On July 8, an all-star team from the Northwest Washington Little League (NWLL) faced off against Mamie Johnson Little League to open the D.C. city championship tournament, the first round in the global annual tournament for ballplayers 12 years old and under that ends with the Little League World Series. The game came to a halt in the middle of the sixth and final inning, when the NWLL first baseman picked up the game ball on his way to his position, prompting the home plate umpire to loudly declare that the first baseman now had to pitch. With NWLL up 6-0 and three outs away from advancing, manager Mike Klisch walked onto the field and spent several minutes conferring with the umpire. The first baseman had already pitched the first four innings before being relieved, so he was likely ineligible to return to the mound. It took a phone call from the ump to Little League headquarters to untangle the rules.
“Is there a 24-hour line to answer questions about rules?” an NWLL mother in the crowd asked as the game resumed.
“Yeah,” responded an NWLL dad, “for rules … and lawsuits.”
A communal groan came from the NWLL side of the grandstand. It was a reaction brought on by the events of the previous year, the worst in NWLL history. As is usually the case in Little League debacles, the season from hell had nothing to do with the kids or anything that happened on the field. The grownups and a seemingly bottomless supply of spite—allegations of cheating and fraud, cries of racism and classism, secret recordings, plus so many lawyers making threats of lawsuits followed by actual lawsuits—are to blame.
At the center of it all was Klisch, who was coaching this year’s NWLL all-star team after being given the job following a settlement agreement that ended a lawsuit brought against the league by another parent named Erin Sweeney, who was within earshot of the lawsuit-weary dad’s comment during the game. Klisch and Sweeney, both accomplished D.C. lawyers, had waged a long, angry, and ultimately successful campaign against the league that resulted in the all-star team’s previous coach, Ricky Davenport-Thomas, being ousted from his position.
The NWLL’s uncivil war garnered two stories in the Washington Post and another in the Wall Street Journal before the season started, which made the league a national laughingstock and look like another safe haven for adults who can’t help but ruin youth sports. The mood around Turtle Park, the home field of NWLL located in D.C’s tony AU Park neighborhood, has been dark ever since.
Several of the more than a dozen NWLL parents I spoke to told me that league brass only agreed to the odd settlement because they thought there was no other way to get Klisch to end what they saw as his war on the league in time for kids to focus on wholesome Little League deeds, like turning tappers in front of the plate into homers and choosing a sno-cone flavor for postgame treats.
“The guy loves baseball,” one NWLL volunteer, who left the league during the brouhaha, told me about Klisch. “His heart was in the right place with it at one point, but he is just willing to burn the house down.”
The former volunteer, like lots of other NWLL parents who Defector spoke with about the ugliness, requested anonymity asserting they feared being sued by Klisch, and referred to him as “the Lord of Turtle Park.”
Klisch’s feud with the league broke into the open in August 2023. Klisch and Sweeney, each of whom had sons playing for NWLL teams, sent an email blast to the NWLL community with a 46-page memo attached. The missive, which Klisch and Sweeney called an “Inspection Demand” letter, was loaded with allegations of what the authors said was “gross cheating, wrongdoing and gross misconduct” on the part of league administrators.
The alleged bad deeds were uncovered by Klisch and Sweeney during an investigation that their memo said they’d conducted “[o]ver the course of more than one year.” The most serious accusations were that Davenport-Thomas, who on top of managing duties had for years also served as president of the NWLL’s board of directors, and one of his longtime assistant coaches, Pete “Coach Pete” Robinson, had been violating Little League rules in order to stockpile talent for their regular-season team in NWLL’s top division (called majors). Davenport-Thomas and Robinson were accused of ignoring geographical boundaries for the league and deceiving coaches from rival squads while improperly recruiting players from other leagues in the city.
Klisch and Sweeney accused Davenport-Thomas of giving a bogusly low scouting grade to a particularly talented new player prior to a league draft, and then using a late-round draft pick to get that player on his majors team. The Klisch-Sweeney document called out the kid involved in the allegedly untoward recruiting and scouting episodes by name.
Klisch and Sweeney also went after Davenport-Thomas for allegedly granting “hardship waivers” without verification or oversight to families that asked for financial assistance to play; the report specifically named one family that Klisch and Sweeney insinuated had been improperly granted aid by the league. Klisch and Sweeney ended their letter with demands that league officials preserve all emails and financial documents, including applications for hardship waivers, for their inspection. Failure to comply with the paperwork and records demands, the letter threatened, would lead to Klisch and Sweeney bringing “derivative action” against league officials.
Klisch listed his contact information from the powerhouse law firm Cooley, and Sweeney used her work email from the similarly robust firm DLA Piper.
In response to the Klisch-Sweeney letter, the NWLL formed a special committee made up of board members who were not specifically accused of any wrongdoing in the Klisch-Sweeney memo. This five-person committee retained lawyers from yet another stout international firm, Steptoe, to help oversee an investigation of the allegations.
The accusers didn’t wait for the investigation to conclude before launching another offensive against the league. On Sept. 18, Sweeney filed a lawsuit against NWLL in D.C. Superior Court. The complaint repeated the accusations against Davenport-Thomas and other NWLL volunteers, and demands for records made in the Klisch-Sweeney letter.
The memo and lawsuit came at a time when the NWLL community should have been celebrating: The NWLL all-star team, managed by Davenport-Thomas with Robinson as his top assistant, had won the 2023 D.C. Little League championship and then made it to the championship game of the Mid-Atlantic regional tournament in Bristol, Conn. The team played Pennsylvania for the right to advance to the Little League World Series, but lost in extra innings on a walk-off homer in the regional final. Still, that was the NWLL’s greatest postseason performance ever. The regional games were televised on ESPN, so the kids and their coaches were celebrated across town during their glorious run. Good vibes turned to fear and bitterness when Klisch and Sweeney’s cheating and fraud accusations were written up in the Washington Post in the fall, portraying the crusading lawyers as righteous and blaming most of the heinousness on Davenport-Thomas.
I was aware of the long and hideous history of D.C. sports dads and moms wreaking havoc upon local Little Leagues, before reading Klisch and Sweeney’s memo. Back in 1993, the Washington Post wrote about a “coup” staged by parents in the Capitol City Little League, an NWLL rival, where league founder Ann Kane was accused of running a shady financial operation and “skirting Little League regulations.” Kane and Cap City survived that tumult by letting the feuding families form their own separate league. And I’d gotten plenty of giggles (and many column inches) out of another Cap City rebellion in 2006, when a group called the Concerned Parents, formed by parents who were mainly concerned that their kids didn’t make the all-star team, successfully conspired to get rid of Kane, the entire board of directors, and the manager of the all-star team, who’d won 13 city titles in a row when he was tossed. Those brouhahas and the NWLL feud had lots of similarities. I got fewer laughs from this latest kiddie-sports soap opera, however, both because of the level of ugliness, and because I had connections to lots of the main characters.
I didn’t know Klisch personally but knew of him; he rescued the baseball program at Hardy Middle School, attended by both of my sons, by volunteering to be manager of the school team last year when the former manager left and nobody at Hardy took the job. There likely would have been no baseball at Hardy, had Klisch not stepped up. Also, my younger son and one of Klisch’s kids were teammates on the Hardy soccer team, and this spring, after taking on added responsibilities within the NWLL via the legal settlement, Klisch hired my elder son to umpire for the NWLL. Years earlier, Coach Pete gave my elder son his first hitting lesson as a 10-year-old, immediately after which he hit a grand slam that both my boy and I definitely still mention too much. Davenport-Thomas coached my two sons in rec league basketball in elementary school, and my kids played with his kids at the D.C. public rec center Davenport-Thomas runs. I hadn’t seen Davenport-Thomas in years before the Little League fracas went public.
Several NWLL parents sent me the Klisch-Sweeney memo soon after its release. Two of the senders told me they couldn’t believe a powerful lawyer like Klisch would actually spend more than a year and untold potentially billable hours— according to Google docs, the manifesto contains approximately 20,490 words—investigating a league run by volunteers. Like lots of others in the D.C. Little League realm I spoke with over the last year about the NWLL’s implosion, they requested anonymity before discussing the document, and alleged Klisch had threatened to either sue them personally for breaching fiduciary duty as board members of the league, or subpoena them to be deposed for existing litigation.
Nichole Francis, a NWLL board member and parent, told Defector in the spring that she felt Klisch purposefully used his work email account from the Cooley law firm whenever contacting her or others on the board. She said that was among the reasons many league volunteers felt they’d be sued by him if they didn’t give him his way.
“He’s using his professional email address to send messages,” said Francis, who is also an attorney. “No way I would be permitted to do any of that. He’s permitted to use his Cooley work email address, never mind the countless hours he spends sending these emails.” Defector emailed a Cooley spokesperson asking if the law firm had any policy on the use of a work account in a private matter like a Little League feud, but got no response.
Klisch told the Wall Street Journal in March that he felt he had to take action after watching his son’s NWLL team, then managed by Davenport-Thomas, rout so many opponents. Klisch told the reporter that the lopsided wins made him feel so dirty he “would just want to go home and take a shower.” Four current or former NWLL coaches told me that Klisch had the same win-at-all-costs attitude during ball games and in his off-the-field squabbles with the NWLL, and that they regarded his depiction in the WSJ story as absurd. They were angry and puzzled at how the paper didn’t mention that Klisch was the third-base coach on his son’s team that routinely slaughtered opponents. (Sweeney’s son was also on that same Davenport-Thomas team.)
They also pointed to portions of the memo that have Klisch and Sweeney alleging that their “children had been excluded” from playing on NWLL postseason teams, whose roster spots are often reserved for the most gifted and talented kids. Klisch and Sweeney alleged that their kids’ failure to be on the NWLL’s invitation-only squad was evidence of Davenport-Thomas and Robinson retaliating for “raising and pursuing the cheating allegations.” Many league parents told me that they suspected all along that Klisch really just wanted to be the all-star manager, so he could make sure his younger son made all-stars this year.
Francis said she supported Klisch when he first proposed reforms to the league, including more oversight in how Davenport-Thomas operated things. But Francis, who said she worked closely with the Steptoe lawyers in their investigation, said their relationship soured when she told Klisch she was unhappy with how aggressive he was toward Davenport-Thomas and other league volunteers while making his demands for leadership change.
“I have asked him countless times: ‘What is your endgame here? Why is this happening? Why are you going after the coaches? Can’t controls be put in place instead of these attacks? Why put kids’ names out there?’” Francis told me this spring. “Mike doesn’t answer my questions.”
The Steptoe committee issued its findings in a 39-page, 18,022-word report dated Nov. 30, 2023. The lawyers said they spent “hundreds of hours” taking an “independent and impartial look” at the accusations, and thereby provided what one NWLL source estimated was $200,000 worth of lawyering, all pro bono. The committee said its investigators found the entire NWLL board and Davenport-Thomas were guilty of sloppy record-keeping, including in league financial matters and while assigning scores to players at annual tryouts. But the report also said the investigation “yielded no findings of fraud, intentional cheating, financial impropriety, or malicious actions.” From the report:
While NWLL was at times disorganized, and at other times, its officers and Board members—including Ms. Sweeney and Mr. Klisch—engaged in imprudent behavior, from the facts we have gathered, no members of the Board engaged in fraud, self-dealing, cheating, financial impropriety, nor retaliation.
The authors of the report issued 16 recommendations to the NWLL board, each aimed at cleaning up what the report described as errors “caused by a lack of oversight and formal protocol that has been perpetuated by a culture of informality within the League.”
The report also described Klisch and Sweeney’s ongoing interactions with NWLL board members and Steptoe’s attorneys while the investigation was underway, which included threats of litigation and recorded conversations. From the report:
Throughout the Committee’s investigation, Ms. Sweeney and Mr. Klisch have communicated with the NWLL community at-large through an email account they created named “NWLL Transparency,” and have sent multiple emails to Board members, the Special Committee, and Steptoe. In more than a dozen emails sent since the transmission of the Demand Letter, Ms. Sweeney and Mr. Klisch have threatened Board members with lawsuits for alleged breaches of their fiduciary duties to NWLL, implied that Board members have engaged in fraud, posited that the Board and the Special Committee are deliberately concealing evidence, and accused Steptoe and the Special Committee of being conflicted. Further, it has been discovered that in at least two instances, recordings were made of conversations without knowledge of all parties involved. The Special Committee has asked for copies of the recordings in an effort to make an unbiased assessment of what was said. To date, Mr. Klisch has declined to share them.
Ultimately, the investigators advised the NWLL board to not follow Klisch’s call for Davenport-Thomas to be suspended.
By the time the special committee’s report was distributed to NWLL members in December 2023, the Post had already published two stories based on Klisch and Sweeney’s manifesto and lawsuit, and repeated many of the cheating allegations the lawyer duo had made against Davenport-Thomas and others. There was no followup article in the paper after the report from the Steptoe investigation. (The reporter who wrote the Post’s NWLL stories, and the editor who assigned them, both accepted buyout offers around the time the Steptoe report was issued, and were gone from the paper shortly thereafter.)
Neha Misra, a former NWLL board member who was a member of the special committee, told Defector that she felt there were overlooked racial and class dynamics at play in Klisch and Sweeney’s war against Davenport-Thomas. Klisch and Sweeney are both white, and Sweeney’s adopted son is black. Davenport-Thomas is black, as are Robinson and the kids who were accused by Klisch and Sweeney of breaking Little League rules by transferring to the NWLL. According to the special committee’s report, both of those players requested to play in the NWLL after receiving “disparate treatment” while playing in another league.
“Nobody was willing to take on the race issues,” Misra said. “It really breaks my heart where someone from privilege, both financial and race privilege, could use that privilege to make allegations and ruin the reputations of people who’d dedicated years of service to Northwest Little League. The attacks made against [Davenport-Thomas] and other people of color were despicable … As a community, we should have been able to resolve this without bringing in lawyers. It’s just Little League!”
Klisch’s bio on the Cooley website shows him as winning one multimillion-dollar case after another while serving as lead counsel at trial. Some of Klisch’s finances are a matter of public record. According to documents from a 2020 case in the D.C. Court of Appeals, Klisch earned $2,321,682 from Cooley in 2017, and as of June of 2018 had a “financial portfolio” valued at approximately $7,891,658, “not including retirement assets.”
Davenport-Thomas is a career civil servant who’s spent decades with the DC Department of Parks and Recreation. His salary from late 2021 is also a matter of public record: City government records say Davenport-Thomas was paid $73,596 that year.
Asked why race and privilege didn’t become a bigger part of the NWLL discussion early on, Misra said, “I think many of us were afraid to speak out because of threats of litigation.”
Misra, who is also a lawyer, said she and many of her NWLL colleagues thought the ugly tumult would subside, and Sweeney and Klisch would stop their attacks on Davenport-Thomas, when the special committee’s report was published. (Misra then declined to respond to additional questions about the NWLL debacle, citing litigation threats. “I’m a single mother,” she said.)
No armistice occurred, however. The Wall Street Journal’s story about the fracas mentioned that one of Steptoe’s partners had a kid who played on Davenport-Thomas’s team. The partner was not on the NWLL’s investigating committee. The Steptoe website says that the D.C. office employs more than 600 lawyers and support staff. This wasn’t the first time a conflict of interest had been raised during the saga, either. The original judge in Sweeney’s suit against the league, Judge Neal E. Kravitz of the D.C. Superior Court, had already recused himself from the case citing his past as an NWLL coach.
Klisch and Sweeney continued their push for a new league president and board of directors. One NWLL parent told Defector that league volunteers realized then that Klisch wasn’t going to stop. Several NWLL board members, including Misra, left or were voted off the league board of directors, and Davenport-Thomas was replaced as league president. Ashleigh Coniglio, who replaced Davenport-Thomas as NWLL president, told the Journal, “The fact that a Steptoe partner’s child was on a NWLL team was completely unrelated to Steptoe taking on this case and its work on the case.”
On Feb. 12, Sweeney filed a motion to compel depositions in D.C. Superior Court. In the filing, Sweeney asks a judge to “order NWLL to make witnesses available for depositions,” and for the league to cover all “costs, fees and expenses” associated with the legal procedures.
On March 17, Coniglio wrote to the NWLL board with a proposed settlement and asked them to approve it or risk having the league lawyered into oblivion. Coniglio’s pitch also informed the board that the settlement would include “no admission of liability or wrongdoing.”
“Please know I realize how undesirable many of these terms are and that we are only doing this to protect the long-term viability of NWLL. Truly, ongoing, protracted litigation could very well lead to the demise of our beloved league that has been around since 1989,” she wrote. “Our counsel is saying that, for the best interest of the league, we should accept this settlement.”
Days later, Klisch and Sweeney settled the lawsuit with the league. NWLL parents and volunteers were irate that the WSJ broke the news of the settlement before Coniglio had let them know about it, prompting Coniglio to send out an apology email saying she was not the source of the leak. The nine-page settlement was devoted mostly to legalese in which all parties agree not to sue each other anymore. The highlights of the document are the passages carving out the all-star managing job for Klisch, beginning with the suspension of Davenport-Thomas.
“For a period of two years, [Davenport-Thomas] shall not coach in NWLL, except for Juniors/ Intermediate/Seniors,” the document read, meaning Davenport-Thomas was actually only banned from coaching 12U teams, from which the summer all-stars for the Little League World Series tourney are chosen. The settlement then stated that Klisch, whose management of the 10- and 11-year-old all-star teams had resulted in two city titles, would be named head coach of the 2024 12U team, per league “precedent.” The settlement stipulated that his appointment would be announced on May 15, 2024. The settlement also stipulated that the NWLL would issue apologies to the Capitol City Little League and Capitol Hill Little League for placing ineligible players on NWLL teams.
Attached to the settlement was a letter that the parties agreed would be released by the NWLL within three business days of the settlement being signed. The letter included a further apology for the use of ineligible players, as well as an apology to Klisch and Sweeney because “their concerns were not addressed soon and in a way that would have avoided acrimony.” The letter also cast vague aspersions on the integrity of the Steptoe report, reading, “While we appreciate the Special Committee’s work, the documents reviewed by some members of 2024 board has raised questions about the accuracy, reliability and completeness of certain aspects of the Report, including certain characterizations in the Report of the findings presented by Mike and Erin.”
The settlement was signed by Coniglio, Sweeney, and Klisch. Coniglio was identified as president of the league on the signing page. Sweeney is the plaintiff. Klisch was not a plaintiff in the suit. I asked Sweeney at a NWLL game if Klisch was her attorney; she shook her head and said “No,” but declined to answer any other questions. (When filing the suit, Sweeney checked a box on one court form indicating it was being handled “pro se,” meaning she would be representing herself. There is no mention in any filing in the case of Klisch being her counsel.) Klisch is identified throughout the 57-page complaint document as “Majors Commissioner.”
Coniglio and the board got lots of heat from NWLL parents after the settlement. Misra sent Coniglio an email blasting the deal and asserting that apologizing to Klisch and Sweeney was “beyond belief.”
“It would be appropriate for the new board as well then to apologize to the numerous former board members and members of NWLL who have been attacked, berated, threatened, and lied about by them,” Misra wrote. “Unfortunately, I do not have the class or racial privilege or power, or the finances, to exert my will through litigation.”
Defector reviewed another email to the board in which an NWLL parent blasted the board for giving the all-star gig to Klisch, who had “gamed the narrative” in press reports, thereby making the league “into a national byword.” The parent said Klisch worked to get Davenport-Thomas and Robinson “out of the way so that he can coach the 12U team,” and then “bullied his way into the spot.”
“This settlement teaches the opposite of everything I teach my sons,” wrote the parent, who was also a former NWLL manager. “This year’s 12U team will be without a coach that is not only talented and baseball knowledgeable, they’ll lose the opportunity to get better. Worse, they’ll lose the opportunity to have two African American men that my two sons love.”
About a week before Klisch was to be officially named all-star manager, another league parent informed Coniglio that he wanted to apply for that job. According to emails obtained by Defector, Klisch had reported that same parent to the board last year for what Klisch described at the time as that parent’s “racial coding” while heckling a black 9-year-old NWLL player during a game. Coniglio referred the job application to a Steptoe lawyer; as per the settlement, Klisch got the all-star gig.
In reporting this story since the spring, I made many requests for comment to Klisch and Sweeney via email and in person. Both repeatedly turned down the opportunity. When I approached Klisch after the NWLL all-stars’ win over Mamie Johnson Little League in July, he politely declined to speak to me, saying only, “It’s been a long, stressful couple years.” After reaching out to Sweeney and Klisch one last time on Sept. 16, I received an email from Megan L. Meier, a D.C. attorney. Meier said she was representing Klisch and Sweeney in a defamation lawsuit they filed on Sept. 4 against other NWLL parents, and that she intended to subpoena me in that suit. The letter, in which Meier pointed out that she’d successfully sued Fox News on behalf of Dominion Voting Systems (and got a $787.5 million settlement), also threatened litigation against me and Defector.
In subsequent conversations with Defector’s lawyer, Meier raised an interaction I had with Klisch about a year ago at our kids’ soccer game. I was sitting on the sidelines with my wife when a guy wearing NWLL gear, who I’d also seen wearing NWLL gear at previous games, walked past. The Washington Post pieces about the Little League drama were a big topic on local message boards at the time, so I asked if he liked the stories. The man told me he was responsible for the Post articles, and asked me what I thought of them. At this point I surmised I was talking to Klisch, who I’d never met before, and said that I knew lots of people in the stories, including Davenport-Thomas, and that I had always thought very highly of him. “You probably won’t like me then,” Klisch said. I responded that if he’s the guy in the newspaper stories, he’s probably right. His attorney, Meier, showed Defector’s lawyer a photo that Klisch had taken of me at that soccer game, along with a text Klisch sent that day to another NWLL coach saying I’d “confronted” him and told him, “I don’t like you.” Needless to say, Klisch’s text message was shown to Defector’s lawyer in an attempt to paint me as out to get Klisch.
Davenport-Thomas told Defector he felt more relieved than hurt when the settlement came out, despite the consequences. He felt the agreement that Klisch worked out proved that the whole shebang was really just about him getting the all-star managing job.
“I believe that [getting the all-star job] was the main goal,” Davenport-Thomas said. “It’s not hard to figure it out.”
Asked how he felt being named as a cheater in the Post, and having no follow-up report after the Steptoe investigation, Davenport-Thomas said, “It didn’t really bother me to the point where people are saying horrible things about me, because I knew it wasn’t true, and people who know me know it wasn’t true. But that narrative had to be pushed for his purpose. It was a smear campaign. ‘How do I get what I want?’ And the way was to make people think I’m as illegitimate as possible. I was never like ‘Oh my god! He’s saying horrible things!’ People that know me know it’s crap.
“He is who he is. Me and him used to talk two or three times a day, every day. I think something became too important to him.”
The 2024 NWLL 12U all-stars squad would not come close to repeating last year’s glories, as it turned out. Klisch’s first stint as all-star manager, and the run for the Little League World Series, would end with losses to Cap City and Capitol Hill Little League in the preliminary rounds of the D.C. tournament.
Another NWLL select team had a good postseason, however. The NWLL juniors team for 14U all-stars won this year’s D.C. championship. The NWLL juniors roster was put together by Davenport-Thomas and managed by Robinson. According to Davenport-Thomas, the city juniors title was the first in NWLL history.