A Field of Our Own: Playing Together, Growing Together

If you’ve been reading Interchange, you know I’ve been playing softball with the Colorado Peaches, the group of older women founded 31 years ago. I’m learning so much along the way, especially in the 12 years I’ve been playing with the oldest team, now ages 79 to 91. We’ve pushed the envelope, so that the Huntsman World Senior Games-Tournaments now have a division for teams as old as ours! Now all the younger women will know they can keep playing as long as they want to play.

In 2012, six team members hung up their cleats, leaving us with a fragmented team in crisis. We recruited new players for one team of 74-to-80 year-olds. We managed to continue playing for two years and competed in the Huntsman Games.

In 2015, an amazing woman joined us. She was too young to play with us — at age 70. But what a coach! We invited other women to practice with us, opened it up to all women over age 50, and they came and kept coming. At present, we have 79 active members. We have grown from one team in 2017 to five teams. We morphed into a club, Field of Our Own, Colorado Peaches. Simply put, our mission is to provide the space and resources for senior women to play ball.

And for me, it’s a lesson in living. We are experiencing all the dynamics of any family or community. It is ironic that what I am experiencing now in our organization reflects what is happening in our country. The main question is the tone of how we are together.

Some of us are here to be together, to play and stretch ourselves to improve. Others have a need for play to be tested competitively. In teamwork, one without the other can generate tension. We started with the impulse, “Come play with us!” When that invitation brings in a surprising array of interpretations as to what it means, sometimes we stumble. The question centers on how we tend the relationships of trust and reciprocity that make all the difference when we go out on the field together.

Sometimes the teamwork goes so smoothly that I just know we are working it out. It’s like a flow, like an elastic band, like there is a hidden choreographer showing us the way to cooperate and, in a word-less way, define ourselves — who we are as individuals, who we are as a team and why we play.