Month: August 2021

Beth Greenwood – Wisdom Beyond Her Years

Beth and I first met back in 2018 when she was on a road trip from New England to Pittsburgh with mutual friends of ours, Erin Pappas and Jacque Reynolds to participate in an women’s baseball event that the Pirates were sponsoring.  On the way through, they stopped by the sports complex that I was managing at the time just outside of Reading, Pennsylvania.

It was a great visit, and Beth and I, who would have been 18 at the time and just out of high school, connected on Facebook.  Since then, I have been able to follow her journey as she became one of only seven young women to be rostered on an NCAA baseball team this past spring.

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Jennifer Hammond – Baseball is in her Blood

Jennifer literally eats, sleeps, and breathes baseball. I’m pretty sure that if you took an X-Ray of her chest, you would see a baseball beating as her heart.  At one point in her life, she said that if she could live on a baseball field, she would.  Her dream was very close to coming true when we were able to connect and talk at the Baseball for All Nationals as she was juggling her coaching duties between both the DC Force Girl’s Baseball team and the Alexandria Aces of the Cal Ripken Collegiate Summer League.

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Denae Benites – Growing with the BFA Nationals

Denae is a member of the Evolution Girl’s Baseball 19-U program as well as a member of the US Women’s National Baseball team that won the gold medal in Mexico in 2019.

Still on location at the Baseball for All Nationals, Denae has been participating in the BFA National tournament since 2016 when she played in the 2nd annual event in San Francisco.  Even at a young age, Denae understands the importance of paving the way and helping to create more opportunities for the young girl’s that will be following behind her.

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This Pup is finally Westward Bound! (Part 2)

We drove for about 2-1/2 hours and then we stopped at the Flight 93 Memorial in Shanksville, PA.

It was a really pretty place, but something terrible happened there back in 2001 before I was even born.  Some really bad people hijacked a plane and were going to fly it into the capital in Washington, DC.  Some of those bad people’s other friends had already crashed planes into the twin towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, DC that same day.  There were some brave people on that plane, and they forced it down and made it crash into this field that we were at instead of the capital.  Those brave people would never get to see their families or puppies ever again.  I couldn’t understand why people would want to hurt people that they don’t even know.

Mommy and daddy seemed sad at times when we walked around.  I wasn’t able to go inside the buildings, but I was able to walk around the outside trails with mommy and daddy.  I helped to keep them happy if they started to get too sad.  A lot of people would come up to pet me and I helped them from getting too sad as well.

My daddy’s mommy helped in the recovery of the place in New York where the planes crashed, it was called Ground Zero.  My daddy thinks about his mommy a lot when he goes to places that refer to 9/11.  Daddy says that she was a great human.  Daddy doesn’t know this, but I have met his mommy.  You see us dogs have a sixth sense that humans don’t have, so I actually talk to my daddy’s mommy quite a bit.  She’s a cool spirit now.

I heard that there were some golden retriever’s that helped at Ground Zero too, I could have been one of those dogs for sure.  I would have been really good at that.

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