Through My Eyes: The Beginning of WSEM

		A Cup of Nick Coffee
		by Nick Coffee

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. It might sound a bit blasphemous to compare Carl and me to God. Also, equate Wiffleball to the heavens and the earth, but that’s how it felt. We created something small that we could do in our spare time. Maybe host a couple tournaments at Brownstown Middle School, perhaps a few trips to other tournaments out of and around the state. We just wanted to play a game that we enjoyed. Practice what we loved. Build what we dreamt.

Growing up with a brother, especially one that you enjoy spending time with, is the best thing for a young boy. We would play countless amounts of games, most of which we made up. Carl was the mastermind inventing the games and together we would come up with rules, regulations, point systems, techniques, and any other way to make the game civil, competitive and all-around fun to play. We spent hours, days, even years playing games from: The Hitting Game, Coff-muda Triangle, Hacky Sack in the Cup Holder, and Marble to the Chapstick. It seems like we should have spent more time coming up with better names, however.

I’m not saying we came up with Wiffleball. If this were my claim, I’d get sued. But we wanted to take this game that we loved to play and bring other people we knew to share our passion. It all started when Carl heard of a Wiffleball tournament in London, Ohio. It was a slow-pitch tournament and I couldn’t have had more fun. We made it to the playoffs and immediately got knocked out. Carl had a vision to bring this to our neck of the woods. I remember the first few times we went to Brownstown Middle School to set up a field. I think the school was under construction, because we found fencing, tubing, poles, and other material we used to create the ever-so infamous “The Rodney.” The green-monster-like left field fence sported a “Danger” sign on it, so we dubbed it “Danger Field.” Get it? Rodney? After that, the track field came up by using hurdles as a home run fence and the black tubing over the chain-link fence, which is still in place to this day.

When it came time to host a tournament, Carl was in his comfort zone. He was always good at organizing those kinds of things. Since this was before social networking websites, we mostly asked people we knew from school and the neighborhood. I remember writing a letter to every newspaper in the metro Detroit area to write an article about what we were doing. All in all, we had about 5-6 teams who threw down 20-something bucks to play. It was a winner-take-all tournament and Carl and I didn’t take a dime of the entry fee. This wasn’t about money to us, obviously, we just wanted to play. And if you’re wondering, two newspaper reporters actually showed up and one wrote a story!

This was the beginning. This was how it all started. This was something that we built from the ground up. Sure, we had some troubles and even went through years of not playing. Some people moved away, others moved in. We had teams who were dominant, teams that sucked, and teams that cheated. We went through different league names, different field locations, different captains, players, field dimensions and THIS YEAR, different bats. But one thing will always be the same; playing Wiffleball brings me back to my childhood. Back to when Carl and I made up our own games and played them for days. Sure, we are getting older. We have careers and some even have kids of our own. I hope our and everyone else's kids will have the imagination, the motivation and the passion to create something like we did. We have to teach them that playing video games and computers are great, but in moderation. We have to teach them to go outside, run, throw, sweat, laugh, build, and always play Wiffleball.