Baseball and softball were the favorite summer sports in Heber. One or the other was played by almost all ages. The little kids played “Little League”. The youth, women and men played “Church Softball”. It is probably fair to say that some type of baseball or softball was being played five out of seven nights a week in Heber in the summertime. I was a part of many of those games either as a player or as a spectator.
We started playing some type of ball about as soon as we started to walk. By the time we got to be teenagers, we were pretty good at it. As with basketball, we played softball teams from the other wards in the stake. If we won the “Stake Softball Tournament,” we went on to a “Regional Tournament”. The region included teams from St. Johns Stake, Holbrook Stake, and Flagstaff Stake. If we won the regional tournament, we went to the” Area Tournament” which included teams from all over Arizona. And if we won that, we went to the “All Church Softball Tournament” in Salt Lake City that included teams from across the United States. During my youth, the team from Heber managed to get to the “All Church Softball Tournament” twice. We made it as far as “area” some of the other years. Needless to say, Heber took its softball very seriously.
I suspect that the positions I played in Little League more or less determined what positions I would play on the church softball team. I played mostly catcher and first base but I did actually pitch a couple of innings, too. I think that it was when I was about fourteen or fifteen that the church changed from playing “fast pitch softball” to playing “slow pitch softball”. It was a good decision. In fast pitch softball, if you had a good pitcher, no one ever even got to hit the ball. Only the pitcher, catcher and batter really got to play much. With slow pitch, that changed completely.
With slow pitch softball, the ball is more or less lobbed across the plate and almost everyone can hit it. The game gets everyone involved in making plays and is much more fun. It also has ten players instead of the usual nine so one more person got to play which was also good. Instead of having low scoring games that were typical with fast pitch, the slow pitch games could often have high scores like fifteen to ten. Everyone got to hit the ball and more people got to field the ball and be part of the game. It was an important change that fit church softball to a tee.
We had a number of different coaches over the years I played. One that I remember was Clarence Crandall. He used to bribe us to win critical games. He would promise us an enchilada dinner if we would win the regional or area tournaments and we enjoyed several such dinners. His wife Carolyn made really good enchiladas and stacked them instead of rolling them up. We all liked them a lot. The promise of an enchilada dinner was a big incentive to win.
The coaches that took us all the way to the “All Church Softball Tournament” were David Reidhead assisted by his brother Larry Riedhead. They worked a lot with us and we had a good team. The first time we got to the “All Church Tournament,” we were eliminated in the first or second game. We had a “really good time” anyway and maybe that was part of the reason we didn’t win. The next year when we got to Salt Lake City, we concentrated more on playing ball and we ended up winning several games. We were eventually eliminated but got fourth place overall. The umpire that officiated in the game we lost suggested that although we had been eliminated, we should stick around for the awarding of trophies, which we did. Our team ended up receiving the “All Church Sportsmanship Trophy” and we were really proud of that. I don’t know whether it is still in the Heber Chapel’s trophy case or not, but it was there for many years. We enjoyed playing softball together and we did it with good sportsmanship, which made it fun for everyone.