April 17, 2026

Josh Throckmorton Had Questions and Started Looking For Answers. Now, He’s Helping Kids in Philly Play Baseball.

“I see change in the community based on just me showing up consistently in a way where I’m not burning out, where I’m able to sustain it,” Throckmorton said. “Just a little bit of your time, if it’s intentional and consistent and you’re building connections with the kids and the community members who are supporting it — that can make a huge difference.”

Josh Throckmorton has had questions about accessibility in youth sports since boarding school baseball, where he was the only legitimate 12th grader on a lineup card full of recruited fifth-year sluggers. When he started coaching after college, his questions blossomed into a full-blown investigation.

In 2021, looking to learn more about the gateways that shape entry into sports, Throckmorton sat down for a google search into postgrad education that would dramatically impact the trajectory of his career. Now, four years after graduating with his Master of Education from the University of Washington’s Intercollegiate Athletic Leadership (IAL) program, Throckmorton is the Director of Program Development for the Philadelphia Youth Sports Collaborative (PYSC).

“PYSC unites over 170 organizations that collectively work to ensure all young people in our city have the opportunity to participate in sports programs, regardless of their background or circumstances,” Throckmorton said. “I think that was a big reason for why I wanted to go to grad school — to learn more about the inequities within the youth sport ecosystem and figure out what I could try to do about those.”

It was his time in the IAL program, during which faculty spoke about the collaborative’s capacity for uniting regional youth sports providers, that Throckmorton first learned about the PYSC. Hearing about an organization doing exactly the work that he wanted to do — in his own community — struck a direct nerve with Throckmorton.

After leaving the IAL program in 2022, Throckmorton worked at Up2Us Sports (now Coach Across America) — another organization he first learned about through IAL course material — where he teamed up with the PYSC for the first time, supporting member organizations with coach development. When the Collaborative launched an initiative in the fall of 2023 to support coaches and programming capacity at city parks and recreation centers, it served as a natural transition for Throckmorton to ultimately join their team.

One of his major roles with the PYSC is overseeing the Octavious Catto Baseball League, named after the man who co-founded one of Philly’s first Black baseball clubs, the Pythians, in 1866. The program, which features Philadelphia Parks and Recreation staff as coaches and organizers, provides kids in the city with an affordable pathway into the game of baseball. 

“Philadelphia Parks and Recreation wants to own the city’s kids’ first experience in sport,” Throckmorton said. “We wanted to create an entry point for kids, who aged out of teeball, or hadn’t played traditional hardball before, to still try the game.”

In its second year of operation, the Catto League has tripled in size in 2026, utilizing the approachable EL1 Quickball™ curriculum to teach the game to kids aged six through 12 at a dozen different locations across the city.

To minimize costs for families, the Catto League provides hats, shirts, and jerseys to its constituents, using foam balls and plastic bats to eliminate additional expensive equipment costs and barriers to participation. Following the conclusion of the program’s nine-week season, PYSC member organizations offer kids opportunities to stay involved with the sport through free and reduced-cost summer camp sessions.

PYSC relies on support from its partnerships with the Phillies, Philadelphia Parks and Recreation, and EL1 Sports, which provides Quickball equipment and training support, to maintain Catto League operations. Using data from its research partners at Temple University, as well as the Parks and Recreation department, the Collaborative has located neighborhoods lacking in sufficient youth programming to establish locations for the league.

While Throckmorton spends the majority of his time making sure things run smoothly administratively, away from the diamond, he still finds the occasional opportunity to throw on the old manager’s cap. 

“Last Tuesday, there was a site where the rec staff was out sick, so I popped in and hosted a practice for them,” he said. “I’ll do the same thing tomorrow. It’s pretty in the weeds, but it’s fun.”

While he spent a decade as an assistant coach at Swarthmore College, Throckmorton’s first direct experience with coaching in the city of Philadelphia was through his own personal project, Bagels and Baseball, in 2021.

Every Sunday morning, he would go to the grocery store, pick up some bagels and snacks, and show up at his neighborhood baseball field at Jefferson Street Grounds — the site where, coincidentally, Octavious Catto’s Pythians played the Olympic Ball Club of Philadelphia in the first racially integrated baseball game in history, all the way back in 1866. Over 150 years later, Throckmorton’s weekly tradition, which had begun with only four kids, was drawing a regular attendance of 40 or more Philadelphia youth. 

Although he abdicated his post as head of the program when he took on his new role with the PYSC, Throckmorton has remained in touch with the coaches to whom he handed the keys — or, rather, the bagels — in 2024. This season, he says, so many of the Bagels and Baseball kids wanted to play in the newly established Catto League that he and his staff of volunteer coaches had to begrudgingly close registrations for that location.

“It’s just took showing up with bagels on Sunday mornings in the fall and spring and being consistent, giving kids from the neighborhood a safe place to go — and some food — and a good time while they’re there,” he said.

While he feels like he’d already been employing some of the tenets he learned about in grad school since his early coaching days, Throckmorton credits the IAL program for putting into words and expanding upon the values he’s worked his whole life to enact through the sport of baseball.

“There was so much, when I was in the program, that was just, like, language for what I was intuiting and doing already,” he said. “The three questions that [Dr. Jen Hoffman] asked us — ‘What’s really going on here, who’s benefiting, and who’s being harmed?’ — completely shifted the way I think about the work that I do. For the coaching cohort that I train, that’s actually the first lesson that I teach.”

Now fully established in his position with the PYSC, Throckmorton reflects on his journey through grad school and his ensuing professional experience as a series of moments of taking initiative.

“I think I’ve learned that doing the work is really not as hard as I’d thought,” he said. “It just took a few minutes of googling local youth sports providers around me, walking into my local recreation center, introducing myself to the staff, and asking how I can be helpful.” 

For Throckmorton, it had always been apparent that those who might benefit the most from playing his favorite game might never even get the chance to try it. It was when he started digging into the reasons why that he began opening up opportunities and uncovering new levels of professional meaning. 

Now, as he forges further into his role as a program director, he believes youth athletics can continue to change for the better when others strive to do the same — to dig deeper into the systems that bar certain communities from sports participation and allow others to play free from obstruction. 

“I see change in the community based on just me showing up consistently in a way where I’m not burning out, where I’m able to sustain it,” Throckmorton said. “Just a little bit of your time, if it’s intentional and consistent and you’re building connections with the kids and the community members who are supporting it — that can make a huge difference.”

Want to meet Josh and his PYSC colleagues and learn about their work supporting great coaches throughout Philadelphia? Join him at the Philadelphia Sports Legacy Honors on May 20, 2026.