Huskies win inaugural Birkenstock tournament

By Mike Zummo
Posted 11/25/20

 

At the end of a long day of softball, the girl with the nickname “Chatter Box” on the back of her jersey couldn’t find the words.Standing near the pitcher’s circle …

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Huskies win inaugural Birkenstock tournament

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At the end of a long day of softball, the girl with the nickname “Chatter Box” on the back of her jersey couldn’t find the words.
Standing near the pitcher’s circle after her team, the Empire State Huskies 14U, defeated the New Jersey Rebels, 3-1 to win the inaugural James T. Birkenstock Strikeout Diabetes Tournament, when pressed to say something, Kalista Birkenstock merely “thanked the teams for coming.”
“It means a lot,” Birkenstock said. “I really wanted to win it. I knew there were good teams here and we were the youngest team. We came out and played good.”
That ended a long but rewarding Saturday at the Hudson Valley Sportsdome. The team didn’t have to arrive until about 9:30, but Birkenstock and her family arrived at the dome at around 6 a.m. to set things up.

“This was like having a second job,” tournament director Greg Locke said. “We decided about a month and a half ago that we were going to put this together. We got a lot of help from friends and family and the community, and the teams. We couldn’t have done it without their support. It’s a long process, but we were able to pull it off. It was great. It’ll be a yearly thing going forward.”
The tournament also provides Kalista and her younger brother, Jameson Birkenstock a way to raise money for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.
“I just wanted to do something to honor him and raise awareness for diabetes,” Birkenstock said. “I just wanted to help.”
Type 1 Diabetes affects about 1.6 million Americans, including 200,000 youth (people younger than 20) and more than 1 million adults. About 60,000 people are diagnosed with the disease each year in the U.S.
About 5 million people in the U.S. are expected to have Type 1 Disease by 2050, and the number is estimated to increase up to 600,000 youth by 2050.
“It was amazing, to the say the least,” Locke said. “To be able to host this tournament and raise a considerable amount of money for juvenile diabetes and to honor the memory of James T. Birkenstock and be able to win the tournament was unbelievable. You can’t put it into words.”
The Huskies played up in a field of mostly 16U teams. Their older counterparts, the Empire State Huskies 16U team lost, 5-2, in the other semifinal. The 14U Huskies beat the Dutchess Debs, a 16U team, 1-0, in the semis.
Winning the championship game took a little bit of a highwire act in the fifth inning, as Molly Farley came in with one out and the bases loaded, preserved a 2-1 lead to win the game, as the 80-minute wound down, making the bottom of the inning, meaningless.
It, did, however, give Birkenstock an opportunity to single and score in the bottom of the inning. After having a strong day, she had gone 0-for-2 in the finals at that point.
“It was something out of a storybook, to say the least,” Locke said. “She played great all day and the team played great. It was probably the best softball we played all year. We beat some really good teams. We were the youngest team in the tournament and to come out on top was amazing. You can’t write books better than this.”