Like any professional baseball team as the winter months start to thaw, the Snowballs have spent the past couple of weeks in spring training.
Hours of batting practice, conditioning, jazz squares. A shimmy here, a swing there. The familiar buzz of a whole new season, new routines ahead — that first, first pitch under the floodlights a mere couple of months away.
Showtime, Chicago.
As the Cubs and White Sox shape up for opening day in sunny Arizona, the city’s inaugural “sportstainment” baseball team is fast-approaching its debut here at home. Come May 3, the Chicago Snowballs will put their spin — a la the Savannah Bananas — on America’s pastime, a moment owners say already has thousands of fans on a waitlist to score tickets.
With their launch, the Snowballs join the ranks of a renewed vigor in remembering sports games are, at their core, games.
“It literally is kids on a playground,” Snowballs CEO and co-founder Cherie Travis said.
For the past decade, the Georgia-based Bananas — who had their Chicago premiere last summer — have made a name for themselves with their brand of baseball antics, a specialty deemed “Banana Ball” that weaves ball play with shenanigans and a flare for the tongue-in-cheek. Think mid-game dance breaks, a twist on the fastball (yes, the baseballs are on fire), even the umpire cutting a rug behind home plate. In 2025 alone, Banana Ball drew 2.2 million fans and is due to expand to a full-blown league this year.
Corey Bell practices his standing backflip during the first team practice for the new Chicago Snowballs baseball team on Feb. 17, 2026, at The Dome at the Parkway Bank Sports Complex in Rosemont. (Chris Sweda/Chicago Tribune)
Sportstainment has its own storied history in Chicago — it’s where the Harlem Globetrotters were founded a century ago. When the now world-touring exhibition basketball troupe was still a novelty, they’d train regularly in the old YMCA building on South Wabash in Bronzeville.
Add in the city’s fierce baseball fandom and affinity for hijinks — let’s not forget the cheese grater hats that flew off the shelves in the Bears’ postseason — and where else but Chicago to launch the latest in sports revelry.
The Snowballs, who brand themselves as the nation’s first pro coed baseball program of its kind, are ready to take up the mantle, and they’re having a grand ol’ time getting there. At their first practice earlier this month, players warmed up with figuring out the intricacies of building a human pyramid, then went straight into dance rehearsal.
“Five, six … five, six, seven, eight — we are the Snowballs!” they chanted, clapping in time with the beat.
‘A joy I’ve never felt before’
Starting a sportstainment baseball team wasn’t something Travis had planned. For more than 20 years, the Illinois native has worked as an attorney. But she’s always been a sports fan and last year, when she heard Savannah Bananas owner Jesse Cole in an interview speaking about plans to expand Banana Ball, she realized: Chicago needs something like this.
Almost immediately, Travis — whose official title, she quipped, is queen of the Snowballs — started calling baseball coaches and stadiums, and devising how to recruit local players who posed the perfect mix between athlete and that certain something extra that would set them apart (the outfielder who juggles, for instance, or a shortstop who doubles as a bona fide songbird).
The Snowballs put out an open call for applicants late last year.
“Get paid to play baseball?” the ad read. “YES!”
More than 650 people from across the country started the application process, with some 300 seeing it through to the end. Ultimately, 100 prospects were invited to a week of tryouts in January. They danced, they sang, they jumped. And they played ball. Though tasked with proving they were Snowball material, the players ended tryouts not so much fighting for that competitive edge but bantering like they’d just spent three weeks at summer camp together.
They auditioned with the kind of carefree fervor that comes with doing something simply because you love doing it — and it was infectious. That’s when Travis and her team knew they were onto something.
“The first night … of tryouts, when I came home my husband asked, ‘How was it?’” Snowballs project manager Kristen Adamiak recalled. “And I said, ‘I have no words.’”
Adamiak remembered growing up going to annual baseball games in the city with her uncle. She went into health care administration as she got older, but her love of baseball never faded. Last year, in the early stages of her Snowball campaign, Travis called Adamiak — who she’d worked with previously — and floated her idea. Adamiak said she was in.
Adamiak wound up quitting her job. She’s now a Snowball full time.
That first day she saw the team take shape, it was everything she wanted it to be.
“Plus more,” she went on, “with fireworks and all the razzle-dazzle. … It’s a joy I’ve never felt before.”
They ultimately drafted 29 players. The roster is made up of firefighters, actors, IT managers, teachers, musicians and photographers. Players hail not just from Chicago and its suburbs, but as far as California and Florida.
On a recent weekday night, after clocking out of their day jobs, players huddled inside The Dome at the Parkway Bank Sports Complex in suburban Rosemont and officially started their season.
“It’s a family reunion,” Travis said as players rehearsed.
A World Series?
Jonah Campbell auditioned as Willy Wonka. Really, that’s what he thinks landed him on the Snowballs, even before he made it to tryouts.
Players, as part of the application process, had the option of sending in videos to supplement their packets. Campbell submitted a series of short clips that ranged from the 32-year-old swinging his bat at a snowball to addressing the camera mid-handstand. But it was one video, where he strolled into frame as the fictional chocolatier with a baseball cane in hand — then ducked, rolled and announced he wanted to be on the team — that clinched him his spot, Campbell ventures.
“It was definitely the Willy Wonka,” he said at that first late-night practice a few weeks ago, his teammates playing catch behind him.
A self-proclaimed “sports kid” growing up in Southern California, Campbell played baseball for the University of Pennsylvania. After graduating, though, he took a step back from the sport because of frequent injury. He went into advertising instead and lately has been trying his hand at yoga and improv.
It was a few co-workers who encouraged him — bullied, Campbell amended — to apply. He was pleasantly surprised when he got invited to be on the team.
“A lot of times people say just do it for the plot,” he said. “For me, that’s what it’s like.”
While admitting the performance side of being a Snowball is relatively new to him, Campbell was at the front of the pack as the team walked through a dance routine to the tune of LMFAO’s “Party Rock Anthem.” Again and again, they repeated the choreography, down to the last eight count. When they at last nailed the footwork, they cheered.
Zakk Suits makes a circus catch while taking fielding practice during the first team practice for the new Chicago Snowballs baseball team on Feb. 17, 2026, at The Dome at the Parkway Bank Sports Complex in Rosemont. (Chris Sweda/Chicago Tribune)
A Snowballs practice runs the gamut from dance and tumbling to baseball and cheerleading. And they have different connoisseurs of each element on staff.
“Man, did you see them catch on really quick?” cheer coach Tonya Radcliffe said after the team had in fact mastered the human pyramid. A youth cheerleading coach for nearly 30 years, Radcliffe said she already has skills she wants the Snowballs to tackle — say, catching a baseball at the top of a toe touch.
But her husband, Ernest Radcliffe, a fellow Snowballs supporter and member of the team’s advisory board, has even bigger aspirations for the team: One day, he envisions a playoff between them and the Bananas.
“Maybe a World Series or something,” he said. “Who knows?”
More than a show
Snow-nana mashups aside, Ernest Radcliffe, who’s spent decades mentoring youth on Chicago’s South Side through sports, said he’s just excited to give players who may have said their goodbyes to the sport, professionally at least, a chance to get out on the diamond again.
“It’s very tough to take the uniform off once your career is over,” he said. “Well, here is a program that’s giving a lot of young people an opportunity to perform.”
Players Laila Summers, lower left, Maximus Bullock, top left, and Avry Blume, top right, learn a dance routine during the first practice for the Chicago Snowballs baseball team on Feb. 17, 2026, at The Dome at the Parkway Bank Sports Complex in Rosemont. (Chris Sweda/Chicago Tribune)
When Laila Summers found out about the Snowballs, it meant the world. Having played T-ball since she was 4 years old, the Tinley Park native played softball competitively through college. But Summers, 23, knew there weren’t as many opportunities to keep going, especially for women, postgraduation.
Women’s pro softball leagues and independent teams have come and gone over the years. Last year, the MLB announced it would be investing in the launch of a new softball league, its first comprehensive partnership with a professional women’s sports circuit. And this summer marks the debut of the Women’s Professional Baseball League, the first pro baseball league for women since the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League — of “A League of Their Own” fame — that folded in 1954.
“But that’s still for like the top, top (players),” Summers said.
Her mom was the one who suggested she’d be a Snowball, knowing that Summers, alongside being a softball player, was a lifetime performer. Singing since she could open her mouth, Summers is an alumni of community theater, has proudly won two local singing competitions and, as of late, performs with cover bands.
When the time came to apply for the team, Summers and her mom sat at the kitchen table and signed her up together. She’s excited she made the cut, especially for the young girls watching. A youth softball coach out in the south suburbs, Summers says she has plans to bring her proteges to a game. She can’t wait to have them in the stands.
For their inaugural season, the Snowballs will tour stadiums across the Midwest, starting with their May 3 season opener at Kerry Wood Cubs Field on Chicago’s North Side. Like the Globetrotters and their perennial opponents the Washington Generals, the Snowballs will ultimately split into two teams and face off against each other in exhibition-style games, but also hope to play college teams and minor leaguers like the Kane County Cougars.
With a second, yet-to-be-named rival roster to fill out, the Snowballs are still looking for players. Another audition is set for next month. They’re especially recruiting for women.
Travis is still thinking about the possibilities touring can bring. Beyond a good show, she wants the Snowballs to leave their mark wherever they go. Her ideas range from a dog adoption event at each stadium to bringing in local veterans as volunteer staff for the games.
“I just want people to come away feeling better about everything,” she said.
If practice is any indication, the Snowballs are naturals.
KG Gaiter laughs as players learn a dance routine during the first team practice for the Chicago Snowballs baseball team on Feb. 17, 2026, at The Dome at the Parkway Bank Sports Complex in Rosemont. (Chris Sweda/Chicago Tribune)
There’s Summers, who says her No. 1 goal is to be sunshine incarnate out on the field. Teammate Nicholas Heerde, who just finished out his college baseball career at Lawrence University in Wisconsin, wants to build a whole Snowball persona. (Everyone’s been calling him “Stache,” he said, for his signature mustache.) Meanwhile, KJ Gaiter has vowed to make every moment of the Snowballs memorable for fans. The Lincoln Park player has even promised to learn how to cartwheel by the first game.
And then there’s Rayquan Minor, who says making people laugh is his specialty. Every day since the 26-year-old Chicagoan made the team, he’s been practicing. That’s meant steady visits to local parks and playing catch with neighborhood kids, usually with the added flair of rehearsing a trick or two as he fields. Sports were always an escape for him growing up, he said, and getting to play, really play again, is how it’s supposed to be.
He can’t wait to share that feeling with an audience. Previewing the season, he said he plans to hit some dingers — but that’s not what he’ll call them.
“I’m trying to hit a few stingers,” he said, hoping “Sting Ray” officially becomes his nickname.
The Associated Press contributed reporting.