04-11-2024 Howard Magazine - Flipbook - Page 30
The entire team poses for a team photo during softball practice at Centennial Park.
keep going. Hopefully, when I’m 80, I’ll still
be doing this.”
Devotees sign up ($29) through the county’s
Recreation and Parks program. Last year, 80
joined on a come-when-you-can basis. Some
have played, literally, to the end. Deaths are met
with solemn reverence: players remove their
caps for a moment of silence.
“We’re a band of brothers,” said Andy Zitnay,
77. A Columbia resident, he has blossomed with
age, having (1) played third base on a national
travel team that won a North American 60-plus
championship, and (2) earned a place in the
National Senior Softball Hall of Fame. Yet these
Saturday outings, Zitnay said, are “the most fun
I’ve had in softball.
“We keep score, but we don’t keep statistics.
We don’t talk about our kids, we talk about our
grandkids. At the end, everyone likes to say that
their team won, but nobody really cares.”
The “drop-in” games stir something primal
in him, Zitnay said:
“It takes you back to when we were 10, and
we’d all go to a vacant lot, and the team captains
would choose up sides by walking their hands up
a bat, with the one at the top getting first pick.”
Surely, they are no longer 10. Zitnay suffered a
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| Spring 2024 | howardmagazine.com
Doug Hanewinckel spears a grounder during practice.
torn labrum (shoulder) and has had both knees
replaced. He has seen players, like Reitz, get
conked by the ball and leave the game.
“They get hit, but, a couple of weeks later,
they’re back,” he said. “They always come back.”
It beats the alternative, all agreed.
“We used to call having an aquarium ‘the
hobby of death.’ Senior softball is a little like
that,” Reitz said. “There’s still fire in our bellies;
it may be the last glowing embers, but it’s there.”