A Fond Farewell...
I wanted to share my thoughts on the upcoming 2018-year and where I stand with the HWL. Before I get into this upcoming season, I would like to take a minute and go into Patrick’s short crazy history with HWL. I was never an all-star. I never led the league in any good category. The one thing I did have was a crazy passion for the HWL.
To understand my passion let’s start from the beginning: I was at work reading the sports section of the Herald-Dispatch and read about a crazy wiffleball league that was going looking for players in Huntington. I thought about it but did not really want to commit to something else during the spring. I honestly did not think much about it after that day until I started to see Brandon Woolum post his players card on Facebook. Once I saw his player’s card, I was hooked. I followed other updates that he would post and I knew I was definitely going to play in the wiffleball league.
Fall of 2013 Brandon shared fall ball dates that Josh and the HWL had posted. I wrote down the dates and started to ask around to find players. The first person I asked was my roommate at the time Andy Hill. Andy was always up for giving new things a go and just wanted to become more active. I then walked next door and asked my neighbor Jacob Dunkle if he wanted to play. Jacob took a little more persuading then Andy, but he eventually caved. We showed up hoping to find a 4th player and make a complete team. We played every week of the fall ball season. I ended up talking Nick Kappra into joining us through the middle of the season and we had what looked like a decent team. I loved every minute of being out on the field.
After the fall ball season had ended, we still managed to play about 4 or 5 more times with the weather holding. In the winter, I got the invite from Josh to speak with him on the leagues podcast. That meeting I had my first taste of what Josh Smith really cared about more than anything. We spoke for roughly 3 hours that night and all of it was about wiffleball and the HWL. He loved everything about wiffleball and HWL was his new child. I was beyond excited for the start of the 2014 season.
The last 4 years have flown by me. I have woke up every single spring excited to start up the wiffleball season. The league has made such huge changes at the start of every season that even though I was excited I was always worried about the league. 2014 season brought the yellow bat rule. 2015 brought a switch to almost a complete duplicate of NWLA. 2016 brought slow pitch style weekend tournaments. 2017 brought back some fast pitch tournaments and the first ever/last Draft. 2018 mixes in many old rules to bring it back to the beginning. So much change, so much excitement and so much debate. One thing that I always loved is the resilience of the league to handle such changes with grace.
That brings us to this year. This year, I look forward to something completely different. I am looking forward to the birth of my 1st child. With that comes sacrifices. I will not be playing in the 2018 season of the HWL. I have spent the last 4 years sacrificing parts of my relationship with my wonderful life because of my love for the league. This year she deserves 100% of my time and energy and since she has let me have wiffleball for so many years, I need to let it go for her. I do not know if I will return as a full time player in the future or if this is my official retirement. I want to hope that one day I will be able to come back out and play.
I want to thank the players of HWL for coming out and having fun everytime we played. They put up with so many different changes. The friendships I have seen built on the fields have been awesome. I regret I didn’t put more energy into forming those relationships over trying to form the league. I hope all understand my love and passion for the HWL. I want players to know that everything I did was for the betterment of the league in my eyes. I hope the league grows to the potential it has and that the players hold up all the members of the rules committee.
Thank you everyone for the friendships and the laughter. Special thanks to Josh, Jacob, Andy, Brandon and Nick. Without them, I don’t think I would have played this wonderful game. The last thing I want for the league to know is that Josh never said he took a lot balls to the face, but he sure implied it.
