Serangoon/Montfort/St Gab History

  DAN [Coach] CROSSWELL/ BILLY Coach remains, and always will remain, simply Coach . Some titles are earned. Others become permanent. Thirty-three years after dragging a handful of expatriates and exchange students onto the scorching afternoon fields of NUS, the founder of this curious movement has somehow created something far more enduring than a weekly softball game. What began as a few homesick North Americans searching for a taste of baseball has quietly evolved into a community spanning continents, cultures and generations. Like every successful missionary, Coach spent decades converting unbelievers, berating skeptics and persuading complete strangers that they desperately needed to embrace the religion of baseball. Looking back, nobody has sacrificed more for the Game. He found the fields, organised the players, coached the teams, argued with umpires, chased equipment, recruited newcomers and somehow convinced hundreds of people that giving up every Saturday afternoo...

  Thirty-Three Years Later To Hell and Back …. And the Game Refuses to Fold Three decades have slipped by since World Series games were watched at Al's place in Clementi, when mobile phones still belonged to science fiction (they probably still do for some of us), and getting from Serangoon to Clementi required a heroic ninety-minute expedition across Singapore. Empires have risen and collapsed. Governments have changed - occasionally for the worse, more often proving that history has an unfortunate habit of repeating itself. Pandemics arrived threatening to wipe out civilisation, social media empires have risen and collapsed, and Artifical Intelligence now promises to solve every problem except how to hit a curveball. Yet through it all, one question has remained stubbornly unchanged: "Who's bringing the bats and bases this week?" Many of the original conspirators have long since departed this humid ex-British colonial outpost. Cricket still refuses to die, w...

  SATURDAY AFTERNOON SOFTBALL (2000), Dan Crosswell: https://saturdaysoftball.blogspot.com/ SECTION ONE: THE ORIGINS OF OUR GAME Six years ago (in 1994), an intrepid baseball evangelist set out to bring the Grand Ol' Game to the idolater Singaporeans, still held in thrall by their infatuation with the unregenerative game of soccer—a legacy of their great misfortune of having been ruled by the British. At least that is one of the creation myths. Others argue the origins of our softball association lay in the psychological need for North American expatriates to distance themselves from their voluntary exiles in Asia by playing the game of their youths. The Singaporeans are merely unwitting tools; their labor and enthusiasms manipulated to serve the selfish needs of disingenuous Westerners. Another school maintains the Saturday afternoon gatherings serve precisely the opposite function—as a vehicle to build cross-cultural awareness and social bonds. Naturally the cynics di...

  Saturdaysoftball.blogspot.com (Chris Yong) https://saturdaysoftball.blogspot.com/ Nov   17, 2004 As Coach has written such a marvelous introduction to the beginnings of the game including interesting write up of players past, Rickey and I have taken upon ourselves to update the list of players who have graced the NUS fields every Saturday. We'll   try to write the players as they have shown up through the years, but otherwise, there is no method to the madness, and no particular order   to the list.   Others will be added soon, as well as lists of top five   homers and classic games. We understand that they've been players who've made an occasional appearance who are not mentioned here or new regulars, like Gunz Horfu, Jason/Diana, Joanna, Teck Piaw, Aaron...etc, and we'll be working on a third chapter to this series to try to accomodate all those who are missing from the rosters so far. We're also working on a SaturdaySoftball who's where now, ...