A trip to Disney World preparing a baseball team for Cooperstown?

It worked for the Beaver Valley Red 12-year-olds.

The Beaver Valley contingent — including Butler residents Dallas Hays, Cade Negley, Cole Shinsky and Alex Stobert — recently won the 104-team Cooperstown Dreams Park Tournament, winning all 11 games it played during the event.

Two weeks earlier, the team competed in a 32-team tourney at Disney World and placed ninth.

“That was 32 of the best teams in America at this age group,” Beaver Valley Red coach Dan Farrow said. “It was like a mini-Little League World Series.”

“That exposed us to good competition,” Negley agreed. “All of those teams were great. The quality of pitching we faced really got us ready.”

Farrow said the tournament field in Cooperstown consisted of “about 30 Little League teams just there for the experience, another 40 teams that were really good and 25 to 30 teams with a chance to win it.”

During the last day of the tournament, Beaver Valley Red played four games, beginning at 8:30 a.m. and ending at 10:30 p.m.

Three of those games resulted in come-from-behind wins.

“We had three ‘dogpiles’,” Shinsky said, refering to wins in the final inning. “That was pretty crazy.”

Beaver Valley Red trailed a team from Southern California by nine runs on that final day and won, 16-15. In the semifinals, it trailed by five runs before rallying to win on a close play at home in the final frame.

Facing South Jersey in the championship game, Beaver Valley Red took an 11-1 lead into the final inning. It held on to win 11-10 as the final out was a liner to second base with the tying run on third.

“In one of our first games, we trailed a team from California 10-2 in the fifth inning before we scored 19 runs after two were out,” Farrow said. “We went on to set a tournament record by scoring 72 unanswered runs over the next few games.”

One game was won by a walk-off grand slam. Stobert needed one out to complete a perfect game on the mound during pool play, but the batter bunted for a hit.

Still, Beaver Valley threw two no-hitters and three one-hitters during the tournament.

Shinsky, the team’s first baseman and No. 4 hitter, hit eight homers during the week. He also went 4-for-4 in the championship game. Hays, the second baseman and leadoff hitter, batted over .500 during the week.

“He might be the fastest kid I’ve ever coached,” Farrow said. “There was one play where our right fielder missed the ball. Dallas ran all the way out to the base of the 200-foot mark of the outfield walk and threw the batter out at second.”

Negley, the shortstop and No. 8 hitter, batted over .400. The team hit 54 home runs during its 11-game run.

“We stuck together the whole time,” Hays said of the comeback wins. “Nobody ever got mad at each other. We knew we could come back.”

Beaver Valley Red has participated in this tournament each year since its inception in 1996. This season marked the seventh time the program has won the championship, also doing so in 2001, 2002, 2003, 2007, 2008 and 2010.

Beaver Valley Red played 70 games overall this summer, finishing 60-9-1.

“We had a great hitting team,” Negley said. “We played the game smart, too.”

Farrow described Negley as “a true team leader with an exceptional mind for the game.”

The tourney championship game was watched by 7,000 people in the stadium and by another 60,000 on the Internet.

“It was the most-watched game in the history of the tournament,” Farrow said.

And that was no bother to the kids on the field.

“We were just out there having fun playing baseball,” Hays said.