some serious game
Double amputee Brandon Rumbaugh, 24, of Uniontown waits to throw out the first pitch Saturday during the game. Rumbaugh was injured in 2010 in Afghanistan when he stepped on an explosive device but he says he is very active, despite his injuries. He attends Penn State - Fayette and races quads.
Double amputee Zach Briseno of Texas races toward first base during Saturday’s softball game between the Wounded Warrior Amputee team and correctional officers for SCI Greene. The SCI Greene team won the game, 26-19.
Sullivan Angelo, right, gets a high five from SCI Greene teammate Doug Butler during team introductions Saturday at the start of the game.
Wounded Warrior Justin Feagin of Texas watches double amputee Brandon Rumbaugh, 24, center, of Uniontown throw out the first pitch Saturday.
More than 200 members of the Pride Motorcycle Club, comprised of corrections officers, escorted the bus carrying the Wounded Warriors softball team into town. The game at Lew Hayes Pony Field was the Wonded Warriors’ only Pennsylvania game this year.
Softball games in the summertime are as commonplace as potato salad at a picnic, but some of the players whacking the hefty leather ball around Lew Hays Pony Field in Washington Park Saturday afternoon were not your typical weekend athletes.
They were members of the Wounded Warrior Amputee Softball Team, a squad made up of military veterans who lost limbs in the Iraq or Afghanistan engagements. Most of the players are in their 20s or 30s, and many were competing with at least one artificial leg and, in some cases, two. A few were minus arms or hands.
The team was created a little more than two years ago by David Van Sleet, who had long worked in prosthetics. That every member of the team is able to swing a bat and maneuver around the field with grace and agility is a testament not only to the progress that has been made in fashioning prosthetic limbs, Van Sleet noted, but also to the determination of the players to rebound from debilitating injuries. Before they entered the military, the members of the team were all athletes and “they didn’t think they were going to walk again, they didn’t think they were going to play again,” after they were injured, Van Sleet explained.
Two games were scheduled at Lew Hays Pony Field; the first pitted the Wounded Warrior team against the corrections officers at SCI-Greene prison, while the second had officers from SCI-Pittsburgh playing the Wounded Warriors. Prior to the games, the team’s bus was escorted to the field by a motorcycle procession from Tanger Outlets in South Strabane Township.
The teams that oppose the veterans are urged to give it their all, just as they would if they are playing a team of opponents who do not have prosthetic limbs, Van Sleet said.
“We don’t want anybody to lay down for us.”
Members of the team hail from locales as varied as Adrian, Mich., Atlanta and New York, and their schedule this summer has seen them traveling to Fenway Park in Boston, where they competed against the softball team of the city’s first responders, along with communities in Florida, Vermont, Washington state and Minnesota. This is the second year in a row they’ve competed against the Greene County correctional officers, and they stopped at the prison outside Waynebsurg Friday and participated in a pick-up game that included some inmates.
The Wounded Warriors “are real athletes,” said Louis Folino, the superintendent of SCI-Greene. “They’re serious about it.”