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SOUTHFIELD — Marlin “Coach Gil” Gilliam has dedicated the last 30 years to giving back to Southfield and surrounding communities through baseball.
In fact, he’s even coaching the children of the now-grown kids that he coached, thus creating a second generation of baseball lovers in the case of Alex Credit, whose 10-year-old son Avery currently plays under Gilliam on the 10U team.
Credit played under Gilliam in the Southfield youth basketball program when he was in elementary school, and said it’s special seeing the same coach reflect the teachings he received onto his son.
“He’s like the uncle or father that you just have to have in your life,” Credit said. “You need people that come with structure and discipline, and they’re just not going to sugarcoat things and keep it honest with you. Yes, he wants the best baseball players and the best team, but he also wants people outside of his world thriving and succeeding.”
Though Gilliam played and coached all three major sports – baseball, basketball, and football – baseball has been a lifelong fixture in his life, particularly since he saw the great need for baseball in the inner-city suburbs of Detroit.
“What happened was I was just going to coach my kids and do my thing, and my youngest is 30, so I’ve been doing this out of a need in our community,” he said. “There’s not a lot of baseball for kids in the inner city.”
Gilliam explained that baseball dried up in Southfield and has become scarce in inner-city communities, which is what led to the founding of the Southfield Athletics in 2004 after the Southfield Little League disbanded. He emphasized that you’d have to go to the suburbs to find the level that the Southfield A’s play.
“So we try to provide that service because it’s all volunteer. Nobody’s getting paid. We love doing what we do,” he said.
The team is a nonprofit, volunteer-led organization that plays at the higher levels of travel baseball as part of the North Oakland Baseball Federation, with a total of 12 coaches leading 50 kids as young as 6 years old and as old as 15 years old.
“That doesn’t mean we go a lot of places,” Gilliam said. “That just means that that’s the level above. It’s the top level of baseball out there for our baseball players.
“And there’s a need. The inner city is very unrepresented because they don’t have any teams to play for.”
The team’s field is located at Springhill Baptist Church, 21900 Middlebelt Road. The mission of the Southfield A’s is to prepare students to play baseball in high school while keeping costs affordable to their parents.
Gilliam explained the main difference between the level at which Southfield A’s play and the levels underneath is “repetition, repetition, repetition, and muscle memory.” Even though the season wrapped up at the end of October, Gilliam said the older kids will begin their conditioning this month, and the younger kids will start back up in January, with their first game taking place at the end of March.
“It’s a commitment from the parents. It’s a major commitment as a member and from the coaches,” Gilliam said. “The kids in our 14-and-under division will have played 60, almost 65 games between the spring and the fall.”
Gilliam emphasized that being a team member of the Southfield A’s involves more than merely playing baseball. He and the other coaches ingrain integrity, discipline and the ability to face challenges head-on.
“Baseball is a sport of failure,” Gilliam said. “The guy that makes the Hall of Fame, their average hitting the ball is 30% of the time, .300 average. So, 60% of the time, they’re not getting on base.
“But you have to have the wherewithal to get past what didn’t work for you the last time you had that. And you still have to have that perseverance to say, ‘I’m gonna get you this time.’”
He often expressed to the older boys that baseball is a tool. He tells them: “Use this to get into school, help your parents pay for school, and let this open doors. ... And then the other thing is, if you really, really say that this is what you want to do, you got to put time, effort and work into it.”
For the intermediate-aged kids, he instills the importance of working as a team and doing their part to put in the work and come to practice.
He says to the younger kids on the team: “The only person in this world I am scared of is your mom. So if you don’t have your homework done, you don’t have your room clean like they asked you to, I’m not going to ask them again to have you at a game. You didn’t do what you’re supposed to do, so you don’t get to do something extra.”
When you look at the Southfield A’s website, you can see that former players have continued their baseball careers at the collegiate level.
It’s only a small testament to the immeasurable job Gilliam has done with the program, and Credit said he expects it to continue flourishing,
“How they’re building it, how they’re structuring it, and the direction they’re going, you just want to see it grow,” Credit said. “Having my son on the team, you just sit there and watch it grow. Coach Marlin, he was my coach. To see what he’s poured into this organization, I just believe in him because I know somebody in this organization is running it from a genuine point of view.”
For more information, visit southfieldathletics.com.
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