“Talking Baseball” (aka BasebALZ) opened its Texas 2019 season with a session at the Kerrville, Texas VA Hospital. Six veterans, plus hospital staff and administrators, were in attendance. This is the 30th program session that we’ve delivered at Kerrville, and we continue to get great feedback from our staff contacts there.
SABR volunteers Jim, Mike, Dan & Ann join VA staff for the January 18 session.
On January 28, we kicked off our 11th “season” of Talking Baseball programs in Austin. We were very happy to welcome several new participants and their caregivers. Eleven participants, caregivers and guests joined our eight volunteers.
In addition to our usual program offerings, we experimented with some new segments. One, entitled “Baseball Time Machine“, asked “If you could go back in time to one ballgame, what game would it be?” We had some lively (and funny) examples, for instance – one of the participants missed Kirk Gibson’s classic World Series walk-off homer because his wife sent him out for Chinese food!
Another new segment was “Get Up and Move”. The idea is to add some light physical activity to the program. Our first try at this was “The Chicken Dance”, a staple at our local AAA ballpark. As you can see from the pictures above, we did get up and move.
One of our regular segments is “Stump the Experts”. Bobby (far end of table in Yankee pinstripes) and Renee attempt to stump the SABR “experts” with a series of clues about a ballplayer’s identity. Bobby took it easy on us today, as we were able to successfully identify that the ballplayer was former Rangers star Josh Hamilton.
Our 2019 season will continue in February with a session at Kerrville on February 8 and sessions at Westminster Senior Living in Austin on February 11 and 25.
We have been offering the Talking Baseball reminiscence program since the Spring of 2015. Our April, 2019 session in Austin will be our 100th session! It has been a fun and rewarding experience for all of us.
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