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The Kickball Diaries
Seventy-year-old Harley-rider Mitch Mitchell takes a swig from his can of Icehouse and walks up to home plate. The star player of the Sarasota kickball team, Biker’s-Bustn’ Balls, is preparing to unleash his secret weapon: a fit of madman-like screaming—in the vein of Animal from The Muppet Show—to distract his opponents.
The first baseman drops the ball out of sheer surprise at Mitchell’s outburst and team captain Jimmy Procopio warns his other athletes: “Don’t freak out.” The maniacal ploy scores high marks for the cigarette-smoking, beer-drinking crew, and it’s all fair play for the members of the Sarasota Kickball League.
The scene is like a flashback to third period recess, shuffling red rubber balls around the softball diamond in tube socks and windbreaker shorts. We all played a round or two of kickball with our classmates and we all inwardly told ourselves, “Someday, we’ll be too old for this.” But local players such as 65-year-old Connie Plocar, of the P.T. Challengers, are punting that negative thought right over third base.
Plocar has been roughing it up since grade school and found rejoining the kickball sphere and mingling with youngsters, to be “refreshing.” On her team, however, Plocar finds her seniority makes her comrades a bit too protective. “It’s a game where you can get a player out by throwing a ball at them. That’s part of the sport,” Plocar says with a laugh. “When somebody did that to me, my whole team was like, ‘How dare you?’ Like it was a crime.”
Well, Peter Pan didn’t have to grow up, and neither do kickball aficionados like Mitchell and Plocar. They are gathering after grueling work hours, slipping on athletic gear and sweating under buzzing fluorescent lights. They are braving orange clay clothing stains, shin splints, bruised elbows and blistered toes. From gulping lemon-lime Gatorade out of plastic tumblers to taking out-of-breath respites on the bench, it’s all for the sake of resuscitating their youth.
Sarasota’s Search for Simple Pleasures
The sport of kickball isn’t one that requires brute strength, agility or even strategic mindedness—it’s as fun loving a hobby as hula hooping or hopscotch. Playing forges camaraderie and municipalities, nonprofits, colleges and businesses use kickball to keep their colleagues tight-knit.
In Sarasota, the Advanced Physical Therapy and Wellness chiropractic clinic sponsors one co-ed adult kickball team, which organizer Palm Selph and clinic owner Kitty Devine launched in the fall of 2004. Selph was thumbing through an article in Cooking Light magazine and stumbled upon an article about kickball and the notion of playing like a kid again. “I said to Kitty, ‘We should start a kickball league,’” Selph says. “And we asked the County how we could make it happen. We found the place and started calling around. It was amazing how many people took to the idea right away.”
Selph and Devine adopted the rules set by the World Kickball Association (WAKA), the international body that supervises divisions across the globe. They reserved off-nights at Bee Ridge Park on Wilkinson Road, solicited sponsors and grew from six teams to 20 (and a total of 360 players throughout Sarasota County). Athletes have to be 21 years old and there must be an equal number of men and women to comprise a co-ed team—there are generally 16 active players and four substitutes. “We’ve had attorneys, doctor’s office staff members, people from insurance companies and mortgage companies coming together,” Selph says. “We now have all walks of life and all ages.”
Teams only have to pay for the cost of the field, the rental of the lights, the final trophies, the balls and the umpire and referee wages. Athletes wear their own self-made T-shirts, think up their own clever monikers, bring their balls every week and hold matches at 6:30pm, 7:30pm and 8:30pm on Thursday and Friday nights in the fall and spring (from September to November and February to May). Bradenton has also cultivated its own brand of kickball at Palma Sola Park and G.T. Bray Park, from November to January and May to August, for the past five years. “The appeal of kickball is simply to play like a kid. There’s nothing threatening about it and pretty much anyone can do it,” Selph says. “At every single play-off, we have many of the team captains saying, ‘I can’t thank you enough that you’ve worked so hard for us to come out and play.’”
Child’s Play
Since the Sarasota league’s inception, players have been amassing anecdotes about their whimsical fieldwork. Elise Lipoff, number 17 on the Shamrock Ballslingers team, which is sponsored by The Shamrock Pub, is currently in her second kickball season. During her first, the team was devoid of a sponsor and matching uniforms, so during one game, Lipoff wore a yellow shirt and corresponding headband, “just because I was feeling lucky,” she says.
Once she arrived at the dugout, she learned that the opposing team’s color was yellow. “I’d hit a decent pop-up to right center field, and as the outfielders were scrambling to get the ball, I screamed, ‘I got it, I got it,’ as I was passing first on my way to second,” Lipoff says. “The other team got so confused that they all moved to let me get the ball, before realizing that I was about to steal third and I was not their team member. Ah, the
power of deception.”
The Dolby Deckers are stocked with six husband-and-wife couples such as Frank and Jennifer Berkey, whose children are their loudest cheerleaders. Before each game, players set up a boom box on the sidelines and blast tunes like Queen’s “We Will Rock You” and Gary Glitter’s “Rock and Roll.” Meanwhile, rival team Balls Deep fantasizes about knocking The Dolby Deckers off their winning pedestal. “Some people are looking to win at all costs and they like to talk smack to get your adrenaline going,” Frank Berkey, 47, says. “It’s competitive. The average age on our team is late 30s. And the guys from Balls Deep are all in their 20s. It’s like the old guys versus the young guys, and they make fun of us.”
Michael Henshaw, the Balls Deep captain, says drumming up nicknames for The Dolby Deckers players is half the thrill. “They have a guy named Anthony who plays short-stop. During the semi-finals, Anthony got caught in the rundown and he was dipping and bending backwards to dodge the ball every time,” Henshaw says. “So we called him Neo, you know, from
The Matrix.”
To field the jabs and elude a losing streak, one superstitious Dolby Decker, Steve Foss, has worn the same pair of cut-off shorts to every game. Even when the fabric became too holey to be appropriate, he patched them, and strapped on shorts underneath to hide the skin the patches wouldn’t. By last season, they were too ripped for repair, but Foss lugs them to every game and hangs them in the dugout. The Dolby Deckers are tied with three first-place seasons, have enjoyed several second-place seasons and finished last season undefeated. After four wins in the last seven championships, players are still banking on the shorts.
—By Abby Weingarten, Photography by Craig Litten
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