TLK Racing Wins the Slowpitch Softball Tournament

The Greenbelt Labor Day Festival is a tradition older than many of the town's residents. Just as traditional as the festival itself is one of its longest running features: the annual men's slowpitch softball tournament.

This year's tournament, which spanned Saturday and Sunday, featured six teams from surrounding communities.

According to tournament director Andrew Phalen, in the early days of the festival — some 40 years ago — the tournament would draw close to 20 teams and would require the use of every softball field in town. Of late, just the two fields at the Greenbelt Recreation Center have been used, which Phalen seemed content with.

"We're at the point where softball numbers are down across the board," he said Sunday. "It's going wonderfully though. Everything runs smoothly and I'm happy with our six-team tournament."

Of the six teams that participated, four were returning squads from the last several years. The other two are teams that play in recreational leagues in Prince George's and Montgomery counties.

Since the tournament was designated as an adult event, rosters featured men as young as 19. The upper end of the age scale topped out around 60.

Six is not an optimal number of teams when trying to structure a tournament, but Phalen was able to make it work by designating Saturday for round robin play and Sunday for seeded play.

The teams were broken up into two pools on Saturday. Each team then played the other two teams in their pool, plus one team from the other pool before the day ended. Based on the results from Saturday, the teams were ranked and bracketed against one another on Sunday in a double-elimination playoff.

By 4 p.m. Sunday, the final two teams, one known as TLK Racing and the other as the Blue Cans (a reference to the Miller Lite they were drinking), found themselves in the championship game.

TLK had lost one game earlier in the day, while the Blue Cans were undefeated the entire weekend. To be crowned champions, TLK would have to win two straight games, while the Blue Cans needed just one victory to earn the trophy and $200 cash prize.

Not only did TLK come out victorious in its first crack at the Blue Cans, but also in the second, a do-or-die game for both teams, which solidified its tournament victory.

"This is just a bunch of friends getting together," said John McGinty of the Blue Cans after the game. "We played last year, and there's no question I would do it again next year."

Calen Tattersall, another Blue Cans member, expressed the same affinity toward the weekend, despite his team's loss.

"This team has been playing for a couple of years now. We come out, play, have fun, do well and support each other," he said.

The tournament certainly provides a great deal of enjoyment to participants, but it's not just the players who look forward to September slowpitch softball each year.

"We have several people that don't even play but they come down to the field just to watch the guys," Phalen said. "It's pretty much a staple of the Labor Day festival."

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