Latest news with #Marinak
NBC News
23-07-2025
- Sport
- NBC News
Behind top prospect Arjun Nimmala, MLB eyes India as next hotbed for talent and fans
Baseball is known as America's pastime, but it has long been a global game. From the Dominican Republic to Japan to Venezuela, the sport reigns supreme for fans, and countless players are on Major League Baseball rosters. The next country that could soon be on that list? India. While its residents may prefer a different game with a ball and a bat — cricket — it's also the motherland of Arjun Nimmala, the top prospect in the Toronto Blue Jays organization. Picked 20th overall in the 2023 draft, Nimmala is the first first-generation Indian American to be selected in the first round. Nimmala, who grew up outside Tampa Bay, Florida, said his father introduced him to cricket at a young age but also taught him baseball. He fell in love with the sport and played competitively all the way through high school until the Blue Jays selected him at just 17 years old. Two years later, he is ranked No. 46 out of 900 prospects by MLB and considered a future centerpiece of the organization. While Nimmala, currently with the Blue Jays' high-A affiliate Vancouver Canadians, continues to ascend the minor leagues, MLB is doing extensive outreach in India by putting together tournaments for children and taking baseball programs to schools. 'We want to try to introduce the sport to as many kids as possible,' Chris Marinak, MLB's chief operations and strategy officer, told NBC News. 'That's the foot in the door. That's the way that you educate kids on the game — you get kids to fall in love with it, and they become fans for the rest of their lives.' He said the goal is to take baseball to India both on the fields and inside homes. 'We're focusing on getting our MLB games on broadcast and streaming,' Marinak said. 'We have two partners in India right now that are putting games live for the postseason and the regular season, and we're seeing great interest from fans around consumption.' MLB opened an office in India in 2019 and since 2021 has hosted the MLB Cup, a tournament for amateur youth teams across the country. Nimmala traveled to India in 2023 to see the initiatives the league was producing and to help grow the game in the country where much of his family still lives. 'To be able to go there and not only see that baseball is a part of India, as well, but just also trying to make it bigger, I think that makes me super proud,' Nimmala said. 'Knowing that I have a possibility of doing that and just seeing how much baseball is played in India already, I thought was very cool.' Asked how big baseball can be in India, a country with 1.46 billion people, Marinak said MLB has high goals. 'When you have a billion fans that are watching cricket, it creates a real opportunity to grow the sport,' he said. 'If we can get baseball to the scale of cricket, it would be a huge penetration into that market. It would look a lot like what you see in Japan [and the] United States. It can be done.' Nimmala says the goal remains to make the major leagues, though that could take multiple years because of his age and experience. His 17 home runs last year led all players ages 18 or younger, and after some early-season struggles, he turned up his production in the second half. From June 27 on, Nimmala hit .265/.331/.564 with 13 homers over his final 53 games. Known as a solid fielder, he has elite arm strength, according to But the stats tell only one part of his story. By just being on the field, Nimmala is inspiring a whole new generation of Indian players. 'I do get a lot of messages, especially on Instagram, from younger kids that are Indian that start to play baseball,' he said. 'They're like, 'Dude, I really look up to you.' I think it's super cool to see that.' But even with all the responsibilities of being a trailblazer, he's keeping his eyes on the prize. 'I have 100% confidence that I will play with the Toronto Blue Jays one day and make an impact.'
Yahoo
04-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
New state law streamlines teacher licensing for Mount St. Mary's, other Md. institutions
A new Maryland law will make teacher licensing more streamlined, education officials say. Before House Bill 888 was signed into law last month by Gov. Wes Moore, colleges and universities in Maryland were required to administer one of two performance-based assessments to students seeking a teaching license. One assessment is the Praxis Performance Assessment for Teachers (PPAT), which is created by Pearson, an education company, and will be retired in December. The other is the Educative Teacher Performance Assessment (edTPA), which is created by the Educational Testing Service and currently being redeveloped. Completing one of those assessments became mandatory after an omnibus state bill intending to make teacher certification more efficient was signed last year. Faculty members at the Mount St. Mary's University School of Education said the bill instead created a financial and time-consuming barrier for their students to receive certification, since the university's program already has a nationally accredited performance-based assessment. House Bill 888, sponsored by Delegates Kris Fair (D-3A), Ken Kerr (D-3) and Eric Ebersole (D-44A) from Baltimore County, makes administering the assessment optional for colleges and universities that have a nationally accredited educator program. The Mount's teacher preparation program, which includes a portfolio assessment, was accredited through 2029 by the Association for Advancing Quality in Educator Preparation. Stacey Brown-Hobbs, who was recently promoted from the chair and director of teacher education to the dean of the School of Education at the Mount, said in an interview that the university's assessments 'go through a very rigorous process during the accreditation process.' 'We were like, why are we making our students do this other assessment when we already are doing something, and we're accredited?' she said. Brown-Hobbs added that states such as New York, Georgia and New Jersey were moving away from the PPAT and edTPA assessments because 'research is showing us that this is not an effective tool. This is not a good predictor.' 'This is a licensure test that's very time consuming for our students at a time when they are trying to begin to learn about the practice of teaching in their internship setting,' she said. 'It's distracting them from really concentrating on the feedback that they're getting from their mentors and supervisors.' Barbara Marinak, the former dean of the Mount's education school who was recently appointed as interim provost, said in an interview that Maryland is in a 'dramatic' teacher shortage. She said the intention of legislation mandating the assessments was never to make the process 'more onerous. The intent was to fully support and recognize rigorous paths to licensure.' Marinak added that schools in Maryland can still choose to administer edTPA for their students to receive teaching licenses, and that this bill gives colleges and universities options. Marinak said she and Brown-Hobbs spoke with Darren Hornbeck, a longtime Frederick County Public Schools educator and the chair of the Professional Standards and Teacher Education Board under the Maryland State Department of Education. Hornbeck helped drive the change. Hornbeck also discussed with Fair how local legislation could remove that barrier for aspiring educators. In the 2001-02 school year, Fair was Hornbeck's teaching assistant at Linganore High School, which Hornbeck said in an interview was 'just such a gratifying thing.' 'Who would have known, like 20 years later, that student who I had sitting three rows back would be producing very meaningful legislation that would help future teachers,' he said. Hornbeck said some schools see the performance assessment as useful because it requires technical writing skill. 'But not all schools were in that boat,' he said. 'Other schools thought they were achieving it in other ways, so we wanted to remove it as a barrier to teachers coming into the profession because of its cost and potential redundancy.' Hornbeck added that the legislation is not meant to decrease standards to receive a teaching license, but to reduce costs and redundancy to students in teacher programs that are nationally accredited. Fair in an interview said working with Hornbeck, who he considers a mentor, felt like a 'full circle moment.' 'It was just really cool to be able to take a challenge that he brought to me and be able to help him fix it,' he said. Fair said while Maryland works hard to certify teachers and encourage them to work in the state, 'we really need to be looking holistically at any barrier to employment for teachers here.'
