City Panel Votes to Name Sports Complex Baseball Field After Doug Berryhill, Palm Coast Little League Champion

Douglas Berryhill, Papa to his family, Coach Doug to his players, died last August, a few days after suffering a heart attack. He was 67.

Last Thursday, the Palm Coast Beautification voted 5-0 to rename Field 6 at the Indian Trails Sports Complex the Doug Berryhill Field. The honor has so far been extended only to Frank Meeker, the former county commissioner and soccer coach who got Field 3, a soccer field at the complex, named for him in 2016. (He also had a tree dedicated in his memory. The county dedicated a coquina monument to him at Wadsworth Park.) Field 6 is one of four Little League fields. The other three are dedicated to softball, a sport Berryhill also thought should be supported.

The committee’s recommendation, which needs the approval of the Palm Coast City Council in mid-February, took place moments after it had also voted to rename a Pine Lakes Parkway trail after the late Shirley Chisholm, who had retired to Palm Coast and lived there almost a decade after a career as an educator and, more notably, as the first Black woman elected to Congress, and the first Black woman to run for president, in 1972. (See: “Shirley Chisholm Trail: Palm Coast Committee Votes 5-0 to Rename Pine Lakes Path After Maverick Black Leader.”)

“What Miss Chisholm did is amazing and important, and in a different way, right? In a national way, in a historical way,” Kyle Berryhill said in an interview today. “I don’t think that there’s going to be any history books” written about his own father. “But I also think what he did is important, and I love that we’re recognizing both things, like a local contribution and a national contribution.”

Chisholm’s work was mostly done by the time she moved to Palm Coast, though she remained involved. Berryhill’s life took a new turn when he moved to Palm Coast. He was having some of those struggles of late middle age, he was searching for something, a center of gravity, an outlet for his passions. He found two: his family–his son describes a bond with his father most fathers and sons would envy–and Palm Coast Little League.




Listen to Doug speak in 2019, as he wrote online: “Sometimes I am just blown away. I joined PCLL in 2010, I have coached so many teams, spring, fall, all star, i coached them all. I didn’t care, I just loved coaching baseball and loved all those kids. Didn’t matter if you were a beginner or an expert or were on my team or another team, I cheered for you and wanted to do my best to help you love the game that has meant so much to me. I went from being new to Palm Coast and knowing no one but my son and his fiancée to knowing hundreds, maybe thousands of people. I went to having virtually no friends to having some of the greatest friends a person could ever have. Best of all I have thousand of memories with hundreds of kids. Cheered for you when you got your first hit, caught that fly ball, scored that run. I tried to encourage you when you struck out or missed that play. I made mistakes I am sorry for those, but it has been the time of my life.”

He had just been handed a collage of memories that included pictures from decades past, and that had touched him deeply. “I never feel so at home as when I am on the baseball field. These pictures show how much I love it there,” he wrote in thanks to Jennifer, the person who’d gifted him the collage. “These kids, these people have brought me so much joy. They have given me the time of my life. I am the one that has received more than I could ever think about giving.”




This tough, leathery man called his words sappy. They were the words of a man whose unseen and unheralded acts had made a difference in the lives of thousands. “There are tons of families that would say that he impacted them,” his son Kyle–who spoke by phone, on his way to picking up his own son from elementary school–said. “I know that besides just being out there with kids, and doing the baseball thing, he cared tremendously about you learning about baseball. He thought it was something that could show you a path to being successful in life, learning how to compete.” Trying to win was important. Trying your best to win was more important. “But it wasn’t the result he was after. It was kind of an internal struggle. Did you do your best?” Not every athlete comes to play with the same set of skills. But all could try their best.

It wasn’t just words: there was a time when a Little League family had been evicted from their house. He took them in for six month. ” he he took care of people in a quiet way, multiple times,” his son said, his emotions overtaking him several times during the interview.

Kyle Berryhill is one of Doug’s three sons, a Palm Coast resident, a long-time coach with Palm Coast Little League, and a battalion chief at the Palm Coast Department, where he was also the acting chief for a few months last year. He had no idea that Peter Schoembs, president of Palm Coast Little League, was submitting the renaming proposal to the Beautification committee. Schoembs, he said, didn’t want to tell him until after he made the pitch. “My family is humbled and honored and really proud to remember Dad in that way, someplace that he loved tremendously,” Berryhill said.

And so came Schoembs’s pitch, a last-minute sort of thing. “We would love nothing more if you would consider allowing us to rename that one ball field after Doug, in memory of him,” Schoembs told the committee. It would let future families know how the organization became what it is.

Doug Berryhill joined Palm Coast Little League staring in 2008, when the organization was almost as young as its youngest players (it started in 2001; the league is open to children 4 to 16). Amicably divorced many years earlier, he’d moved to Palm Coast to be close to his son Kyle, but also because he wanted to get involved in Little League. A native of Brandon, he’d lived in Orlando previously. He’d worked as a software salesman for several companies, including his brother’s, a company called DecisionLinks.




The league had about 350 athletes at the time. “Doug always thought that wasn’t enough,” Schoembs said. Berryhill had recruited Schoembs as a coach. “This league could be bigger, it could be better. It could serve the community better. It could be an example of how great this community can be. Fast forward. We’re over 600 kids now.”

The league actually has two seasons, with 600 athletes in the hard-nosed spring season and 400 in the somewhat more laid back fall season, when the focus on instruction is more pronounced. “I give him the majority of the credit for that,” Schoembs said. “He laid the groundwork for that years ago. He knew how great little league was then. But he also knew how great it could be in the future. And he worked tirelessly for that. He came up with the idea of putting fliers in schools so kids would know, hey, we have an organization out there for you. And he didn’t want you to join Palm Coast Little League the organization. He wanted you to join the family. And he stressed that for years.”

He “harassed” the City Council for more fields, successfully, if at times with great difficulties.

Berryhill was the head coach of the major divisions for a dozen years, won many district titles and twice took teams to the state championship, which is no small achievement: only eight teams from around the state qualify, out of some 120 or 130 teams. It so happens that Palm Coast is the eighth largest Little League organization in the state, Schoembs said, thanks to Berryhill working to help it grow.

He did so as a volunteer, as all Little League coaches and others in the league are.




“He was intense. Both in in discipline and in celebration,” Kyle Berryhill said. “If you missed a ground ball, he was the first one to tell you to get your head up and make the next play. We all miss a ground ball. But if you missed an assignment, if made a mental mistake, because you were being mentally lazy, you would learn about that pretty quick, in an intense way. But if you did something good, even if the result wasn’t good, like if you lined out to the shortstop, so you made an out, but you hit the ball hard, he celebrated just as passionately. He always wanted to keep the ratio of positive things above the other ones.”

Doug Berryhill’s struggles were over when he moved to Palm Coast. He’d found his two loves: his family, and the families he joined through Little League. Kyle and his brothers, Trevor and Brooks, all had children around the same time–two each, for a total of six grandchildren for Doug. “So his grandkids were the other thing that just made him feel like his life was bursting,” Kyle said. His father, he said, had the happiest years of his life that last decade, and Kyle had his best friend for those years.

The interview with Kyle had to had to end when his son James hopped in the car at the end of the school day. It was time for father and son, that other enduring legacy.

As for the Beautification Committee members, the Schoembs ask seemed to be a no-brainer: “Let’s do it,” one of the committee members said befiore the vote. “How much more evidence do we need of how important this fellow was?”