DiMisa Fellows deliver end-of-season book reports

Book report presentation

ROCKVILLE, Md. — The 2025 Bethesda Big Train DiMisa High School Leadership Fellows completed their summer reading for the season. The group came together yesterday to discuss what they read and their takeaways. Founder Bruce Adams led the conversation and emphasized that each book had a lesson that would translate to growing the Big Train brand. 

Rochester Institute of Technology freshman Sorrel Becker read Alone on the Wall by rock climber Alex Honold. Honold was the first person to climb Yosemite's El Capitán without being attached to anything.

“I’m very much into memoirs,” Becker said. “It’s interesting to see from their perspective.”

Becker has always been fascinated by Honold, so when he saw that he had a book, he was eager to read about his journey. Becker learned a lot from the book. He explained that Honold was an introvert who lives in a van. Becker said that one wouldn’t know that just by watching him climb. 

“He had interesting stuff about when he gets to the hardest part of the challenge, and it seems like he might fall, and he just keeps pushing through,” Becker said. “That’s something we did this season at Big Train with all the doubleheaders we had. We had to really push through it.” 

Sorrel Becker giving his report

Becker explained that the days felt repetitive at times, but each of the interns could not look back. Adams wanted each of his fellows to focus on how each of the books could apply to the Big Train and make the fan experience as enjoyable as it possibly can be.

Fellow intern Cayla Berger — a senior at Walter Johnson High School — read Baseball Like It Oughta Be by Tom Alesia, a book about the Madison Mallards baseball team in Wisconsin. Berger said the book highlights the Mallards’ success bringing in fans over time through community events, helping to distinguish the team from others in summer ball.

“I learned that no matter how frustrated you get with something or how bad something can be, it’s best to push through and keep going,” Berger said. “We here had a lot of rain delays and rainouts, and we had to kind of push through that.”

Berger said the community work described in the book is similar to what Big Train interns have done over the summer.

“In the book, they basically would go out in the community and they’d just help out,” she said. “So here we do Manna Food Drives and Roberto Clemente Day, where we go out to six locations and we just help out the community wherever we can.

“And for their activities during the games, their mascot would fly on a zip line, and they’d have other fun activities that would incorporate the fans and not just staff and players. Here we also try to do that, especially with the Pup Run, where we have kids run with Homer and Bunt. Really, they would — a lot of times —- go out into the community and try to interact with the community, and that’s what we try to do.”

Click HERE to read more about some of the books that inspired Big Train baseball!