The B.C. Swingers women’s softball team knocked off a few youthful up-and-comers to capture a silver medal at a tournament in Utah this month.
The team, with two players from Burnaby, was up against teams in the over-70 majors division at the Huntsman World Senior Games in St. George, Utah.
Thing is, most of the Swingers are well over 75.
“Our team is going into the 75-plus next year and we were in the 70-plus this time,” Burnaby player Bobbi Wallace, 79, told the NOW, “so we played some teams that have just moved up from the 65-plus bracket.”
When push came to shove, though, the Swingers were up to the task.
“It was excellent. We worked very hard,” said Surrey resident Joan Dyer, the team’s founder and most experienced player at age 82. “We’re old in our age group, and we had to play a team that just moved up, and we beat them three times.”
Through seven games in three days, the Golden Gals from Florida was the only top-bracket team the Swingers couldn’t take down.
“Nobody beat them,” Dyer said.
The B.C. Swingers are 11-year veterans of the Huntsman, with numerous gold medals to their credit.
For the last 11 years, the team – with players from the Lower Mainland, Nanaimo, Bowen Island, Kamloops and Winnipeg – has gotten together for about six two-hour practices at New Westminster’s Moody Park to prepare for the annual Huntsman.
“I thought we did quite well considering our team is kind of spread out and we don’t get to practise together as much,” said Wallace, who walked away from this year’s tournament final with a broken finger thanks to an errant groundball.
Over the years, the team has also travelled to tournaments in Arizona, Nevada, Tennessee and Georgia.
“The social aspect is so good plus the health. This is what’s keeping us healthy,” Dyer said.
The Swingers come from many walks of life – married, widowed, single; retired teachers, ex-accountants, former stay-at-home moms.
And, while many of them play on other slo-pitch teams when they’re not with the Swingers, their sports backgrounds are diverse too.
Wallace has played competitive ball since age 15 when she played on a senior A fastball team in Moose Jaw, Sask. in the ’50s, but she has also been to the mixed Canadian curling championships and perhaps loves golf most of all.
Dyer remembers playing some softball in Grade 7 and not taking it up again until about age 33 in the Surrey Married Women’s League in the late ’60s and early ’70s.
Swingers’ manager Vale Savege, who represented Canada at the Pan Am Games on the national women’s basketball team in 1967 and the national women’s volleyball in 1969, came to organized softball in her 60s, after an invitation from B.C. Swingers player-coach Darlene Currie, a longtime former Burnaby resident who now calls New Westminster home.
A member of the Burnaby Sports Hall of Fame, Currie is a legend of Canadian women’s basketball, representing the nation at three Pan Ams before becoming the national team’s head coach from 1970 to 1972.
“I think you find, after 50, those people that have carried on and done some sport of some kind can easily pick up a new sport,” Currie told the NOW.
Some of the Swingers play in co-ed slo-pitch leagues as well, but Currie said playing on an all-women’s team gives them a chance to compete on a level playing field.
“The women like to compete against each other,” she said.
A girls-only team is also a lot of fun on trips, according to Savege, who added to the fun herself this trip by slipping on a skeleton Halloween mask with long grey hair while the team was waiting together at the airport.
“We get together and you’re kind of all single again, if you know what I mean,” Savege said.
