Chilkat Valley News - Serving Haines and Klukwan, Alaska since 1966

Little League may be over, but both fields on Sawmill Road will again see back-to-back games this weekend – now with adult players.

From Aug. 12 to 14, three local and four visiting teams will face off in the first softball tournament Haines has hosted since 2010. The tournament will be a double elimination round robin – 14 to 16 games total -- with the first game starting around 3 p.m. on Friday and the championship game finished by 2 p.m. on Sunday.

Connie Ward, a longtime Haines softball enthusiast who is organizing the tournament with her daughter Jeanine, said she’s planned some other festivities around the games themselves. They’ll hold a raffle on Saturday -- with prizes donated from local businesses – and a “Home Run Derby,” in which entrants pay $5 to see how far they can hit a ball. (The winner pockets the pot of money.)

On Saturday, players will fortify themselves between games with a potluck featuring fish donated from local fishermen and side dishes brought by Haines team members.

Sarah Elliott, who is playing for the Haines Packing team, praised Ward for the community-oriented, “welcoming” approach in organizing the event. She said she remembers the same festive spirit from the Haines softball league of her youth, which Ward also organized; back then, each season was capped off by a “huge picnic” in Tlingit Park, she said.

The four visitor teams hail from Juneau, Skagway, and Whitehorse. The three local teams are Wolf Pack, from Klukwan, and two teams sponsored by local businesses: Haines Packing and the PBRs. All seven teams are co-ed.

Elliott said adult softball in Haines is “very casual.” A weekly Thursday practice only sometimes takes the form of a full game if enough participants show.

She said she thinks the success of Little League the past few summers might have contributed to the reemergence of Haines’s softball tournament: “Little League (has done) a ton of improvements on the fields, so now there’s a new push,” she said. “The fields look so good.”

She also said she knows several players whose children participated in Little League.

Co-ed adult softball tournaments are common throughout Southeast. Whitehorse’s annual Dustball tournament is an especially well-attended example, Jeanine Ward said, though Haines Junction and Skagway also hold annual tournaments. Ward estimated that Juneau has 15 adult softball teams and said she thinks “softball is the leading sport for adults to play, especially in Haines.”

Connie Ward said Haines’s tournament is being held in honor of Sam Hotch from Klukwan, who was one of Haines’s biggest baseball fans. “He was really inspirational to everyone,” Ward said. “He would show up in rain, in snow, to cheer everyone on.”