Butler area residents Connor Ollio and Brandon Fleeger recently played baseball — and plenty of it — at Cooperstown Dreams Park in New York, near the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Both got to enjoy a dream experience along the way.

Ollio, of Connoquenessing Township, and Fleeger of Butler are members of the Beaver Valley Red 10-year-old traveling baseball team. Beaver Valley was competing in a week-long, 83-team tournament in Cooperstown.

Each team sent a representative to take part in a skill competition during the tourney. Ollio wound up winning the Golden Arm Award while Fleeger won the King of Swat, a home run derby.

“To have two kids from our team win contests like that was pretty special,” said Heather Fleeger, Brandon’s mother.

For the throwing contest, a 4x8 foot wooden background was set up behind the plate. A circled bullseye was painted inside a red target on the board.

Participants threw from center field. If they hit the board on a fly, they received one point. Hitting the target was three points and hitting the circle was worth five points.

Ollio made the final round of 11 by scoring four points, then scored five points to win the championship round.

“We were probably throwing from 125 feet away,” Ollio said. “There were no warm-ups or anything. We just had to throw.

“There were a lot of people watching, but I just focused in on the target.”

Both contests were witnessed by approximately 6,000 people in the stands at Cooperstown Little Majors Stadium.

Fleeger hit one home run during the preliminary round of the King of Swat. Like the Golden Arm contest, 11 reached the finals. Fleeger drilled five homers during the championship round to win the competition.

His last swing broke a tie and sailed out of the entire stadium. The distance to the fence was 200 feet.

“We were all told that if you hit one home run in the first round, you’d make the finals,” Brandon Fleeger said.

Fleeger became the first boy from Pennsylvania to win the King of Swat in the tourney’s 15-year history.

A total of 83 teams played in the double-elimination tourney on 22 fields.

“It felt like we were playing on major league diamonds. Those fields were awesome,” Ollio said.

The play of the Beaver Valley team wasn’t too bad, either.

Because of rain delays, Beaver Valley had to win four games on a Thursday to reach the championship game, where it fell to the 6-4-3 Cougars of Marietta, Ga., 5-0.

Beaver Valley won games played at 12:30 a.m., 8:30 a.m., noon and 3 p.m. before playing the title game at 9:15 p.m.

“We were tired. We ran out of gas,” Fleeger said.

Fleeger pitched five innings of relief in the semifinals — a 5-3 win in seven innings over top-seeded Santa Ynez (Calif.) — while Ollio pitched late in that game.

Ollio also tossed a four-hit shutout over King Baseball (Texas) in a 4-0 win at noon that day.

Beaver Valley defeated teams from Connecticut, Florida, Texas and California on that one day. Ollio hit .577 for the week.

The Beaver Valley team is headed to Disney World in Florida this weekend to compete in a 72-team tournament.