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• The Gulf Breeze Dolphins beach volleyball team was recognized at Blue Wahoos Stadium for repeating as FHSAA state champions and national champions.
• Seniors Izzy Beech and Karmyn Ferguson threw ceremonial first pitches.
• The team achieved a 21-3 record in 2025, following a perfect 22-0 season in 2024.
• The Dolphins have reached the state tournament three consecutive years.

A little less than a month after repeating as FHSAA state champions, and staying on top the MaxPreps national rankings, the Gulf Breeze beach volleyball team has had a few busy weeks.

The end of the school year had something to do with that.

Players had to go through their end-of-year testing, along with just the general festivities that come with being a graduating senior for the six on the team Dolphins that walked the stage at the Pensacola Bay Center.

But for a few minutes on June 5, in front of a few thousand fans at Blue Wahoos Stadium, the Dolphins took a chance to recognize just what happened during the 2025 season.

Gulf Breeze came into the season as defending champions, looking to have a good season once again. The team wasn’t exactly looking to stay on top as state champions, but just have a successful season. “And success can look a bunch of different ways,” Gulf Breeze head coach Chelsea Kroll added.

“We were successful in a lot of ways. Then it was just the jewel on top to be able to call ourselves state and national champions again,” Kroll said.

The recognition at Blue Wahoos Stadium included ceremonial opening pitches from seniors Izzy Beech and Karmyn Ferguson, who played together throughout the season and initially gave the Dolphins a 1-0 lead in championship match against New Smyrna Beach.

“It’s weird to think that we are done with our high school career,” said Beech, who was also on the Dolphins’ indoor volleyball team in the fall that made it to the state title game. “We’re excited to see what the future holds for us.”

“I don’t think it’s really set in for me, especially being a graduating senior,” Ferguson said, referring to repeating as champions. “It’s surreal that our high school careers have ended. It’s just crazy that it’s over. We accomplished a lot. But I feel like we should be accomplishing more.”

The cheers were plenty loud from the stands, and from the backstop where the rest of the beach volleyball team stood in support, as both players threw their pitches from just in front of the mound.

“I didn’t know how it was going to go. I was just hoping I wouldn’t toss it into the stands,” Ferguson said with a laugh.

Said Beech: “I was too worried about bouncing it (off the dirt), so I threw it a little high.”

Beech and Ferguson, along with the rest of the senior class, accomplished a lot with the Dolphins. For those who were with the team since the beginning, starting in 2023 when the group was in their sophomore year, Gulf Breeze has been to Tallahassee for the state tournament three years in a row.

The Dolphins, in their first year as a program, made it to the state quarterfinals before falling to New Smyrna Beach, which ultimately won the state championship. Gulf Breeze achieved an immaculate 22-0 season in 2024 to claim the state crown, before finishing 21-3 and defending that crown this season.

“Man, I’m going to cry. I’m going to miss them so much,” Kroll said when asked about the senior class. “All six of them have had enormous contributions to this team, both on and off the sand. It’s just an incredible group of girls that started this program with us, and now they’re moving on to bigger and better things. They’re leaving some really big shoes to fill next year.”

Both players and Kroll all acknowledged how special it was to be honored by the Blue Wahoos again. The team was recognized after their first state championship, as well. Allie Hepworth and Sydney Sutter, instead of an “opening pitch,” had an ceremonial bump-set-spike.

Sutter bumped the volleyball to Hepworth, who set up Sutter for a spike to home plate. But that doesn’t take away how special it was to be recognized, again, as national champions by the hometown professional baseball team.

“It’s pretty incredible that they want to give these girls the platform to be recognized in the community,” Kroll said. “We’re really grateful that the Blue Wahoos have that community outreach and are willing to do something like this.”

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Less than a week before Imane Khelif was poised to return to competitive women’s boxing, the sport’s new global governing body set up a potential roadblock.

World Boxing announced last Friday that Khelif cannot participate in any future women’s events unless the Olympic champion takes a gender verification test to prove that Khelif is biologically female.

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The International Olympic Committee ignited global outcry in Paris last summer when it allowed Khelif to march to a gold medal in the women’s welterweight division. Only a year earlier, Khelif was disqualified before the gold-medal bout of the International Boxing Association’s world championships. The IBA, then recognized as amateur boxing’s global governing body, claimed that a sex test showed the presence of Y chromosome and ruled Khelif ineligible to compete against women.

Three months later, the IOC stripped the IBA of its governing status for multiple reasons, after which IOC leaders chose to overlook Khelif’s alleged failed gender test because they had questions about the fairness of the IBA’s process. That turned the IOC into a piñata for critics at last summer’s Olympic Games as Khelif pummeled an overmatched Italian fighter into quitting in 46 seconds, then toyed with her remaining opponents while displaying superior reach and punching power.

In February, the IOC recognized World Boxing as its new governing body for the sport — and assessing how to be fair to Khelif and her potential female opponents instantly moved atop World Boxing’s to-do list. The solution that World Boxing chose was making sex testing mandatory for all boxers who compete in events it sanctions. The organization announced the policy change ahead of this week’s Eindhoven Box Cup to get ahead of the tournament Khelif was targeting for her potential return.

“This decision reflects concerns over the safety and well-being of all boxers, including Imane Khelif,” World Boxing said in last Friday’s statement. “It aims to protect the physical and mental health of all participants in light of some of the reactions that have been expressed in relation to the boxer’s potential participation at the Eindhoven Box Cup.”

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The Khelif controversy exemplifies why dividing athletes into male and female categories for competition isn’t always straightforward. Gender policing has existed in women’s sports for nearly a century as administrators have grappled with deliberate cheating, transgender athletes and complex medical conditions resulting in ambiguous development of sex organs.

Sports governing bodies have used anything from invasive visual examinations, to testosterone tests, to chromosome analyses in their long-running attempts to distinguish men from women. The most common outcome has been humiliation for female athletes confronted for the first time with the possibility that their genitalia, internal anatomy, hormones or chromosomes developed differently than most of their peers.

That presents a conundrum for sporting governing bodies: How should they treat an athlete who was classified female at birth and identifies as a woman yet possesses a Y chromosome? How should they handle it when that athlete’s differences in sexual development offer a potential advantage in sporting performance over other female competitors?

Dr. Richard Holt, professor of endocrinology at the University of Southampton, describes that decision as a “minefield.”

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Says Holt, “There is no easy solution — all have potential pitfalls.”

‘The nude parade’

The desire to define who counts as a woman for the purpose of sports dates back to Hitler’s Olympics. On the night of Aug. 4, 1936, 18-year-old Helen Stephens of Fulton, Missouri, went to bed the newly crowned fastest woman in the world. The next morning, Stephens awoke to an international firestorm.

A Polish newspaper correspondent could not accept that Stephens had defeated famed Polish sprinter Stella Walsh to win Olympic gold in the 100-meter dash. He published a story discrediting Stephens’ world record performance by alleging that the tall, muscular American with an unusually deep voice was really a man masquerading as a woman.

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Rather than dismissing the Polish sportswriter’s accusation as sour grapes, Olympic officials responded by revealing that they had anticipated such a controversy. They told reporters they had Stephens examined before the Olympics and cleared her to compete after confirming she was female.

At least one U.S. media outlet reached out to Stephens’ mother seeking her response to the speculation about her daughter’s gender.

“Helen is absolutely a girl,” Bertie May Stephens told the reporter by telephone from Missouri, adding that she better not say what she thinks of “anyone who would charge that she is anything else.”

The scandal reflected the growing unease at the time over the physical appearance of female athletes enjoying success in sports once deemed too strenuous for women. They were often perceived as suspiciously masculine because they didn’t conform to the era’s notion of femininity.

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In early 1936, American Olympic Committee chairman Avery Brundage wrote to IOC colleagues expressing concern about “various female (?) athletes in several sports” who seemed to possess “apparent characteristics of the opposite sex.”

“Perhaps some action has already been taken on this subject,” Brundage added. “If not, it might be well to insist on a medical examination before participation in the Olympic Games.”

The first known gender verification rule in women’s sports took effect less than a week after Stephens’ gold medal win in Berlin. Track and field’s international governing body implemented a policy requiring female athletes to submit to physical examination should any protest be filed regarding their sex.

When the Olympics first became a stage for Cold War tensions in the 1950s, familiar concerns about female athletes deemed too man-like suddenly were seen through a geopolitical lens. Rumors flew that the brawniest female athletes from the Soviet Union and other Eastern-bloc nations were taking performance-enhancing drugs or were actually men in disguise.

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Soviet track and field stars Irina and Tamara Press, sisters who combined to claim five Olympic gold medals and set 26 world records, aroused the most suspicion. Western media outlets derisively labeled Irina and Tamara “the Press brothers.” In 1964, a New York Times reporter wrote that Tamara “was big enough to play tackle for the Chicago Bears” and that “they could probably use her, too.”

In 1966, international track and field officials responded by enforcing a mandatory sex testing policy often referred to by athletes as “the nude parade.” Every female participant at that year’s Commonwealth Games had to undress on-site before the meet and display themselves to doctors for visual inspection.

Irina and Tamara Press hung up their track spikes and retired. Other athletes gritted their teeth and endured the humiliation. In an interview with NPR’s “Tested” podcast last year, Canadian discus thrower Carol Martin described being taken into a large room underneath the stands and having “to pull my pants down in front of this woman so she could see I had a vagina.”

“I remember thinking, ‘What the [expletive] is this?’” Martin told the podcast. “And I was a nice person. I never said that at the time, but I remember thinking, ‘Whoa, this seems a little invasive. This seems a little inappropriate. I mean, can’t you see I’m a girl?’”

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Nude parades, unsurprisingly, proved deeply unpopular. Athletes successfully campaigned to abolish the practice after only two years.

‘There’s definitely not an easy solution’

Modern methods of sex testing may only require a swab to the cheek or a few drops of blood, but critics contend they’re still traumatic.

Athletes rights advocate and Humans of Sport founder Payoshni Mitra has worked on behalf of numerous high-profile athletes revealed to have unusually high testosterone levels. Some battled through severe depression, Mitra said. One family even lost their daughter to suicide.

About a decade and a half ago, Caster Semenya became the unwilling face of a complex, emotionally charged debate over what to do with athletes who don’t fit neatly in the “male” or “female” category. The muscular South African middle-distance star blew away the women’s 800 meters field at the 2009 World Championships, but she couldn’t outrun the whispers and innuendo that followed.

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“For me she is not a woman,” said one beaten fellow finalist, Italy’s Elisa Cusma Piccione.

Another overmatched rival, Russia’s Mariya Savinova, sneered, “Just look at her.”

At the request of track and field’s governing body, Semenya submitted to a gender verification test and found out along with the rest of the world that she was different. While Semenya was born with a vagina and assigned female at birth, her test results showed XY chromosomes, no uterus and unusually high testosterone levels.

Stunned and devastated, Semenya weighed her options. Either she had to quit track at age 18 on the heels of winning World Championship gold or consent to hormone treatment to lower her testosterone to a predetermined level.

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The hormones felt like “poison,” Semenya wrote in her 2023 memoir “The Race To Be Myself,” but she fought through panic attacks, night sweats and nausea to keep flourishing. Second place finishes at the 2011 World Championships and the 2012 Olympics were later upgraded to gold medals when Savinova was found guilty of doping. Semenya also led a podium sweep by DSD runners at the 2016 Olympics after the Court of Arbitration for Sport temporarily forced World Athletics to suspend its testosterone regulations.

On the eve of the 2016 Olympic final in the women’s 800, Yahoo Sports asked American 800-meter runner Ajee’ Wilson how she felt about Semenya. Should Semenya be free to compete without being forced to take testosterone suppressants? Or should her basic rights be infringed on to avoid unfairly disadvantaging the other female competitors?

“There’s definitely not an easy solution,” Wilson conceded. “There’s a saying that says you shouldn’t really come hard at a problem unless you have a solution. I don’t have one at this point, so I have to go with the flow of things.”

While World Athletics now administers gender tests to all female athletes, from 1999 to 2024, track and field’s governing body tested only targets of suspicion. Human Rights Watch condemned that approach in 2020, pointing out that the athletes being ensnared by sex testing were “overwhelmingly women of color from the Global South.”

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Among those is Annet Negesa, a promising Ugandan middle-distance runner targeted under sex testing regulations and found to have unusually high testosterone levels. Negesa agreed to undergo what she was told was minor surgery in late 2012 in hopes of altering her body and saving her career.

When she awoke in a hospital bed, she told Human Rights Watch in 2020 that she had scars on her belly and discharge papers mentioning an orchiectomy — a procedure to remove testicles. The recovery from the surgery was long and painful. Never again did Negesa regain her previous fitness levels. Her manager dropped her and her university yanked away her scholarship.

Today Negesa lives in Germany, where she was granted asylum in 1999. The athlete ambassador to Humans of Sport shares her story as often as possible in hopes that it can help others. She has been following Imane Khelif’s story from afar.

“I am extremely disappointed to see how another athlete from a different sport is being made to face such a public trial,” Negesa said this week in a statement to Yahoo Sports. “It is devastating for the athlete. Federations must act responsibly. They have played with our lives for too long.”

IOC has egg on its face

Thirty-six hours after World Boxing ruled that Khelif would need to pass a gender verification test to be eligible to fight against women again, the document at the heart of this entire saga may have surfaced.

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American sportswriter Alan Abrahamson, formerly of the Los Angeles Times, published to his website 3wiresports.com what appears to be a leaked image of Khelif’s sex-test results from the 2023 IBA world championships in New Delhi.

The chromosome analysis says that Khelif has a “male karyotype” (an individual’s complete set of chromosomes). IBA officials had previously alleged without offering proof that Khelif was XY.

It’s unclear how Abrahamson attained the apparent leaked document or whether it is legitimate. Neither Khelif nor anyone with the Algerian Boxing Federation have publicly addressed the 3wiresports.com report or World Boxing’s mandatory sex testing policy.

The test results carry the letterhead of Dr. Lal Path Labs in New Delhi, accredited by the American College of Pathologists and certified by the Swiss-based International Organisation for Standardisation. That appears to fly in the face of claims made last August by IOC spokesman Mark Adams, who during a news conference at the Paris Olympics took the stance that any test administered by the IBA was essentially fruit from a poison tree.

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“The tests themselves, the process of the tests, the ad hoc nature of the tests, are not legitimate,” Adams said.

Also left with egg on his face is IOC president Thomas Bach, who several times insinuated that the Khelif test results were part of a Russian disinformation campaign. The IBA is run by Umar Kremlev, a Russian businessman with close ties to the Kremlin.

“This was part of the many, many fake news campaigns we had to face from Russia before Paris and after Paris,” Bach told Reuters last March.

If the leaked test results put pressure on IOC officials to explain why they believe they’re illegitimate, they also increase the burden on Khelif to make a public comment.

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When speaking to reporters in Paris after her gold-medal match victory last summer, Khelif brushed aside questions about her gender.

“I am a woman, like any other woman,” Khelif said. “I was born a woman. I have lived as a woman. I compete as a woman.”

Khelif has previously said she wants to win a second gold medal at the 2028 Los Angeles Games. For now, the notion of her receiving clearance to fight against women again at a future Olympics is becoming more difficult to envision.

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Gary Price and Steven Seymour stood on the silver metal concourse, staring at the field through the drizzle, sipping steaming hot chocolate they had just purchased at the shaved ice truck.

From left, Steven Seymour and Gary Price sip hot chocolate on a cool opening night in Marion. Photo by Chad Osborne.

Like everyone else at this high school stadium, the best friends since childhood were bundled in coats and caps. Some others wrapped themselves in blankets and ducked under umbrellas to hide from the threatening clouds.

“It’s great to have baseball back in Marion,” Price said.

Baseball? In these conditions?

On Memorial Day, Marion’s newest summer baseball team, the Hungry Mothers, took the field for its inaugural home game at Hurricane Stadium on the campus of Marion Senior High School. The team name, Hungry Mothers, is a fun nod to the nearby Hungry Mother State Park, located about 5 miles from the ballpark.

The Mothers, as some fans are already affectionately calling them, are a collegiate wood bat team, meaning most of their players compete on college teams where aluminum bats are used. The team is independent from a league for its first season and will play a 40-game schedule in 2025, primarily against teams from North Carolina that also carry amusing nicknames like Corn Dogs, Wampus Cats, Bigfoots and Swamp Donkeys.

At Marion’s home opener, the Hungry Mothers hosted the Carolina Disco Turkeys. The two teams had already squared off against each other two nights earlier on the Turkeys’ turfed home field in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Marion won that game 11-4, although the team managed only five hits. Pitchers for both teams combined to walk 31 batters. The first game in Marion’s existence took about four hours to play.

“I think it was one of the longest nine-inning games I’ve ever been a part of,” Marion head coach Steven McMillian recalled a couple of nights later.

The Memorial Day game was different in many ways, from the play on the field to the excitement in the air, neither of which could be dampened by the cold rain and chilly temperatures. 

“We’re tough old birds,” said Price. “We don’t care [about the weather]. We used to run and play in weather like this, so we’ll come out here and watch a good ballgame.”

Carolina’s Disco Turkeys, in their brilliant peacock blue uniforms, jumped ahead in the first inning, scoring four runs before the Hungry Mothers had a chance to bat. But no one in the crowd of nearly 500 people seemed to mind much.

“We’re just glad to have another opportunity for Marion, because Marion is such a great home place,” Seymour, 56, said as the game slipped into the bottom of the second inning. “We’ve grown up. We’ve seen the good and the bad, and this is definitely a good thing for us.”

As the umpire called a strike below, Price took a sip of hot chocolate from a white Styrofoam cup and said, “We could be watching some of the stars of tomorrow here.”

* * *

Hungry Mothers mascot Molly Dew makes the rounds at Hurricane Stadium. Molly takes her name from Hungry Mother State Park’s Molly’s Knob and Marion’s connection to Mountain Dew. Photo by Chad Osborne.

If that line rings familiar, it likely means you know a little about Marion’s place in baseball history. In 1965, Major League Baseball’s New York Mets placed a minor league affiliate team here as a place to start the development of future players.

Bob Garnett, a banker in town, served as president of Marion Baseball. One of his many roles with the team included sitting behind a microphone for most home games as the ballpark’s public address announcer. 

“Welcome to Marion Stadium, home of the Mets,” Garnett would say, “where the stars of tomorrow shine tonight.” 

Most anyone who attended those games in the ’60s and ’70s still remembers Garnett’s famous line. It even made an appearance in a July 1966 New York Times article. “I think everyone in Marion took that [line] to heart, which was lovely,” said Times reporter Robert Lipsyte in a 2021 phone conversation, decades after he’d visited Marion to report on New York’s Baby Mets.

No matter who you talked with at the Hungry Mothers’ opening night at the Marion stadium — young people and those who were a bit older — the name Nolan Ryan would often come up. 

This plaque honoring Nolan Ryan and the Marion Mets rests in the brick sidewalks of downtown Marion. Photo by Chad Osborne.

He is easily the Marion Mets’ most famous alumnus. On Main Street in Marion’s downtown section, a small plaque honors Ryan, resting in the brick along a sidewalk. 

The tall right-hander from Alvin, Texas, arrived in Marion in early June 1965. Garnett picked him up from the bus stop, and for years, he told the story of the lanky pitcher looking so frail that Garnett worried Ryan’s luggage “would break his arm in two.” Ryan’s stop in Marion was the beginning of a long baseball career, one that didn’t end until he retired from the major leagues at age 46. He still holds the record for the most career strikeouts, with 5,714, and no-hitters, with seven.

Many of Marion’s new Hungry Mothers cite Ryan’s legacy as one reason they chose to play baseball this summer in Marion.

“When you go out there you have a feeling that somebody great has been here before you,” said Carter Sayers, a Marion native and rising sophomore pitcher at Emory & Henry University. “You’re in the presence of a lot of history on this field.”

Though Ryan is Marion’s most famous former player, several others got their start here during the team’s 12-year affiliation with the New York Mets. One was Jim Bibby, who spent much of his life in Lynchburg and played professionally for a handful of teams. He and Ryan were teammates on Marion’s 1965 team. Other Major League alumni include Mike Jorgensen, Tom Foli, John Milner, Alex Trevino, Jody Davis and Jim McAndrew, who, along with Ryan, was part of New York’s 1969 Miracle Mets.

Most players, of course, never made it to the big leagues. Many moved on to other professions. They became coaches, teachers, architects, neuroscientists, actors, priests, circus trainers, bankers, broadcasters and so forth.

Former major league catcher Birdie Tebbetts coached the Marion Mets in 1967, a year after managing the Cleveland Indians in the majors. That got the attention of Life Magazine, which sent a writer and photographer to Marion to document what they called “A big leaguer in the boondocks.”

In addition to the Mets, Marion hosted another Appalachian League team briefly in the summer of 1955. When Welch Miners team officials decided they could no longer take on more debt to save the team in the small coal-mining West Virginia town, Marion offered to be the Miners’ new home. The team became known as the Marion Athletics and played out the season in the town’s then brand-new ballpark, Marion Stadium, now called Hurricane Stadium. Semi-pro baseball has a history in Marion, too. The Cuckoos played on the grounds of the Southwestern Virginia Mental Health Institute in the 1930s and ’40s, and the Marion Bucks played on the same field in the 1950s. 

Marion’s rich baseball history played a significant role in landing the Hungry Mothers, nearly 50 years after the Mets abruptly left town in 1976 for reasons no one seems to remember.

Other Southwest Virginia towns were attractive potential locations for the Hungry Mothers. Greg Sullivan and Terry Hindle, the team’s managing partners, who have working connections to North Carolina-based collegiate wood bat teams, found Marion, a town of about 5,600 people, to be the most alluring. 

“We went through the area with a fine-tooth comb,” Hindle said a week before Marion’s home opener, “and we found that a combination of things, the support from the local community and the history of baseball here, were a good combination. There’s a passion here.

“When you start hearing that the New York Mets had a rookie ball team here for all of those years, to me, that was the icing on the cake. It’s definitely a point of pride for this area.”

The team was officially introduced to the community on March 20 at a late-morning press conference in the Marion Senior High auditorium. Hindle, Sullivan and others involved in the process announced the team name, colors — red, black and white — and logos, one of which is a cartoonish, left-handed swinging mother bear with a baseball bat resting on her shoulder, snarling and ready to pounce on a fastball. At the announcement, Hindle said his group intended to keep the team in Marion “for the long haul.”

“We decided to make an investment into this community and into this team, and it’s something that as an organization we didn’t take lightly,” he said later, in mid-May. “We did a lot of homework and figured out this is where we wanted to be.”

Once they chose Marion, Hindle and Sullivan contacted Amanda Livingston, Smyth County’s director of tourism, in the fall of 2024.

“I would say I was a facilitator and people connector,” Livingston said. “They were interested in expanding, and they felt like Southwest Virginia was a great market. I 100% agree. Smyth County and Marion love baseball. We just have an innate love of baseball, and I think they rightly guessed, and it has been proven true, that there is a hunger for this type of family entertainment.”

Livingston connected Hindle and Sullivan with members of Smyth County’s board of supervisors and school board. Talks began between the entities in December and wrapped in January, recalled board of supervisors Vice Chair Mike Sturgill, who also works with the county’s school board. The talks involved Marion Senior High School administrators to discuss using the field, which is also home to the school’s varsity and junior varsity baseball teams.

Once there was an agreement to allow the new team to play on the field, a number of improvements had to be made to the ballpark that was built and opened in the mid-1950s.

For one, the crumbling painted red cinderblock outfield wall that stretched from the left field foul pole to extreme center field was demolished. A black chain-link fence replaced it. That was the easy part. Perhaps the most difficult chore was resurfacing the infield dirt and resodding the infield and outfield grass. 

Marion Stadium is a multipurpose facility that also houses a football field for the high school’s Scarlett Hurricanes. In the fall, the football field runs through baseball’s right field and into the infield between first and second base.

“They basically took a bulldozer, cut it off, regraded, and hauled in several truckloads,” Sturgill said of the baseball field reconstruction.

“The county and the town of Marion put in some money” for the project, said Smyth County Administrator Shawn Utt. Also, “a lot of the work was donated.”

Marion Senior High School varsity baseball coach Kevin Terry and a group of his ballplayers took on the responsibility of replacing the grass. They received the first truckloads of grass on March 14. 

“This stuff here,” Terry said in mid-April, pointing to the new sod, “comes in rolls of 2 feet by 3 feet … and we put 17 pallets [loads] down.” He and a friend began working on the field on the morning of March 14, starting at about 7 a.m. When the day’s final school bell rang, his young volunteers trekked to the field to help. Terry and some of his senior players worked until about 1 a.m. Saturday. “We got the entire infield done — the diamond area — that night,” the coach said.

After a bit of sleep, they returned around 10 a.m. and worked until 5 p.m. to carefully place rolls of sod — around 2,000 square feet, Terry noted — in the outfield.

Coaches and players on the Marion Senior High School varsity baseball team volunteered to resod the entire field at Hurricane Stadium in preparation for the Hungry Mothers’ season. Photo courtesy of Kevin Terry.

School board superintendent Dennis Carter said the town and county’s new baseball venture is a “win, win, win.”

Among those wins was the opportunity for economic development — “it gets some folks into Smyth County and the town of Marion,” Carter said — and a chance to make much-needed improvements to the Marion baseball complex.

The third win is giving students who recently graduated from Smyth County schools an opportunity to play once again in front of a home crowd while honing their baseball skills.

“It’s going to be a good opportunity. It’s going to be fun,” Sayers, the 2024 Marion Senior High graduate, said before the team’s first practice. “There will be a lot of people in the stands who watched you play in high school, and they’re going to watch you come back and play for this team as well. To be able to pitch off this mound again is going to be pretty neat. I’m looking forward to getting started.”

* * *

Coach Steven McMillian, right, in gray hoodie and red shorts, addresses his team at their first practice at Hurricane Field on May 24. Photo by Chad Osborne.

Hungry Mothers players and coaches met in person for the first time at 6 p.m. May 23 at Hurricane Stadium, only 25 hours before their first official game in Winston-Salem. Not everyone was there yet. Some players were still with their college teams. 

“Tonight, we’re going to get together, throw some bullpens,” McMillian said as players got acquainted, “see what kind of arms we have” — that’s baseball coach-speak for pitchers — “take some in and out to just to see what position guys we have, and then we’re going to go hit in the cages just to kind of have an idea.”

McMillian has a long history coaching baseball, 26 years to be exact, but this is his first venture into skippering a collegiate summer league team. The Mount Airy, North Carolina, native is currently the head coach at Southwest Virginia Community College in Cedar Bluff, and before that, he was an assistant baseball coach at Emory & Henry. He also runs his own travel ball organization.

“I’m just excited about the newness and the opportunity to be a part of something here,” he said before formally talking to his players as a group for the first time. “When I came here to the opening day ceremony [announcement at Marion Senior High], I was blown away by the love and what the town of Marion wants to do for this team.”

Moments later, McMillian instructed the 22 players to have a seat along the third-base line. He introduced himself and his wife, Candice, and urged the ballplayers to curb their language around his young son, who was sitting nearby. Many nodded in respect to his wishes. He briefly talked about what was to happen in the rest of the night and Saturday. McMillian told them when to arrive at the ballpark the next day — “We’re leaving around 2-ish,” he said — how meals would be handled, and when batting practice would take place once they arrived in Winston-Salem for their date with the Disco Turkeys.

“Any questions?” he asked. One player asked when they would receive their uniforms. 

“They’re supposed to get those to us tomorrow,” he answered. “You get two jerseys, one hat and two pairs of pants.”

McMillian also explained the evening’s hour-and-a-half practice. “We’ll throw some pens and hit the [batting] cages,” he said.

It all was running smoothly until the coach noticed something missing: There were no baseballs to be found. Thankfully, one of his assistant coaches had a few boxes of balls.

“Being a part of a new program, there’s always kinks to everything you do,” McMillian said. “But, we’ll try to get this thing rolling in the right direction.” 

The next night’s 11-4 victory over the Disco Turkeys did a lot to move things in a positive direction for the Hungry Mothers.

* * *

Catcher Owen Repass of Wytheville runs onto the field during player introductions. Photo by Chad Osborne.

Hours before the much-anticipated Memorial Day home opener, rain poured in spurts in Marion. It rained. It stopped. It rained and stopped again. A common question posed on the Hungry Mothers’ Facebook page throughout the morning was various forms of, “Is the game still on for tonight?”

Eager fans got their answer shortly after noon when the team’s social media manager posted: “Game is still on for tonight! The field is being prepped for tonight’s opener at 6:30.”

When the Hurricane Stadium gates swung open at 5:30 p.m., the parking lot was already filling up. And the vehicles kept coming, windshield wipers swishing back and forth.

Remember the famous line from “Field of Dreams”? If you build it, they will come. 

Hungry Mothers players await the umpire’s call of “play ball!” Photo by Chad Osborne.

Inside the ballpark, fans grabbed hot dogs, popcorn and nachos at the concession stand, which was run by the Marion Senior High School band boosters. (Word around the ballpark said the hot dog chili was delicious.) Some plunked down in lawn and camping chairs. Many flocked to the long, covered area along the third-base line.

But not Carole Rosenbaum. “I’m going to sit up there,” she said, pointing to the small open-air metal bleachers behind home plate. Rosenbaum, 82, is a Marion resident and lifelong baseball fan with a gnarly collection of baseballs autographed by scores of Marion Mets players, including Nolan Ryan. In her collection, too, are nearly a half-dozen broken bats from Mets games she attended as a child and teenager and a couple of decades-old worn gloves that she and her father used when having a catch at their home. 

“It’s so exciting to have baseball back here,” said a beaming Rosenbaum, clad in a navy-blue rain jacket, as she made her way through the crowd, past the souvenir table and into the bleachers minutes before the pre-game festivities began on the field. 

Smyth County native and renowned Hank Williams Jr. tribute artist Arnold Davidson sang — as himself, not Hank — a warm rendition of the national anthem as the crowd stood and teams lined up along the first- and third-base lines. Throwing out the ceremonial first pitches were Utt, the county administrator; board of supervisors member Mike Sturgill; and Carter, the outgoing school board superintendent and only lefty in the group. Each, it appeared, threw strikes.

Jacob Nester (on the pitcher’s mound) is the answer to the trivia question: Who threw the first pitch for the home team when summer baseball returned to Marion? The umpire called Nester’s pitch a strike. Photo by Chad Osborne.

The game got underway moments later when Hungry Mothers’ right-handed pitcher Jacob Nester of Carroll County fired a fastball to the plate for a called strike, much to the delight of his chirping teammates in the third base-side and the home crowd, despite the rain, wind and 56-degree temperature.

From there, however, the Mothers struggled. On top of their four-run first inning, the Disco Turkeys piled on another run in the second, two more in the third and one in the fifth. If you’re keeping score, that’s a 7-0 advantage.

Despite the score, and the on-again, off-again drizzle, Marion’s crowd hung in there with each pitch. You couldn’t have found a more delighted fan than Betsy Shearin, whose son, Daniel Shearin, plays first base for Marion. Betsy Shearin lives in Independence but grew up in Marion. She met with family members at the game, including her brothers, Norman and Don Barker, who played baseball for Marion Senior High.

“To be able to come here and watch him [Daniel] play is such a big deal,” said Shearin, wearing a white sweatshirt — she made it herself — with the Hungry Mothers’ mamma bear logo on the front and Daniel’s jersey number, 32, in red on the back. “We’re just baseball through and through.”

Norman Barker wished “Marion would do a little bit better tonight,” getting a chuckle from his family, “but it’s just exciting to have it back into the community.”

As the game reached the top of the sixth, Steve Foster, Greg Rashad, Frankie Newman and Phillip McElraft, who grew up together in Marion, talked and joked as the Disco Turkeys loaded the bases. 

Allan Creasy was working in the concession stand when a foul ball landed nearby. The Marion Senior High School student briefly left his post behind the counter, darting out to grab the ball before anyone else. He later got it autographed. By who? “No. 13,” he said. Photo by Chad Osborne.

Newman and Rashad have purchased season tickets for the Hungry Mothers and proudly wore their passes on lanyards around their necks.

“I don’t know how many games I’ll get to, but I want to support them all I can,” said Newman, who lives in Christiansburg.

Rashad chimed in. “It’s back. Baseball is back in Marion,” he said with great enthusiasm and a New York Mets cap resting on his head. “It’s about time! It’s good to be back watching the game. You can’t beat this.”

And then …

CRACK!

It might have been the loudest sound at the ballpark that night. It’s the sound a bat makes when perfectly colliding with a pitched ball. If it’s a batter on the team you’re rooting for, it may be the sweetest sound in baseball.

With one violent swing of the bat, a Disco Turkey hit a ball that appeared to be destined for the railroad tracks beyond center field. Maybe the moon.

“Oooooh,” said someone in the grandstand.

“Did it go over?” Rashad asked anyone who could answer.

“Robbie Smith with the grand slam,” PA announcer Kevin Schwartz confirmed. 

The home run blast put the game even further out of reach at 11-0 for Carolina.

“Do they have the 10-run rule in this league?” Newman joked. They all laughed.

Turns out, he was right. When Marion failed to close the gap through seven innings, the game was considered complete.

Disco Turkeys 13, Hungry Mothers 0.

“I’m going to be honest, the first home game was a little rough. You know, we’re still learning what we have,” McMillian said moments after the final out was recorded, as his players collected their bats and gloves from the dugout. “We made a few mistakes the first couple of innings. We didn’t start our first home game off very well, but we got great kids who are working hard. And we got great support from the crowd here tonight.”

The night’s results didn’t seem to matter to fans, who smiled all evening through the chill and rain and occasional blunders. Because after five decades of missing summer baseball in Marion, the fact that it was back — win or lose — was all that really mattered.