For 25 years now, it’s worked, and worked again, the simplest of ideas that has become the most important community event for this North Shore city of just over 40,000 people — the moms from each school in town play each other in a weekend-long softball tournament that has never stopped growing. This year’s competition had 370 players on 23 teams, including a few alumni teams for moms whose kids have graduated but still want to play Momball.
The competition began in the late 1990s, in a dentist’s office in Beverly, when Eileen Moffett told a mom from another elementary school: “I bet our moms can beat your moms in softball.”
No sooner did word get out about a potential game than another elementary school in the city said, “We want in.” Before you knew it, Moffett pulled together a seven-team tournament, and the entry fees, sponsorships, and concession sales bought a school a new computer resource room, with money left over to go to an education foundation. Bill Wholley, a reporter for the Beverly Citizen, gave it the name Momball.
Soon, the Catholic schools asked in, and the Montessori school and Essex Tech, and the tournament just kept getting bigger for Beverly, in every way, including the amount of money it has raised through the years for local charities and schools.
On Friday, this year’s 370 players gathered around the infield of a Little League diamond at Harry Ball Field, which honors a man who was deemed to have the greatest name in history, perhaps.
Moffett was one of several honored in the celebration of a quarter century of Momball — it started in ’99, but missed a year for COVID – and the anniversary was cause for reflection, but also suggestion. This has worked so well and is so simple, why doesn’t every community do this?
“Before this, we moms didn’t know each other,” Moffett said. “We were isolated by schools. But suddenly, the city became a lot smaller. I wish more towns and communities would do something like this. It’s just so great.”
After the shenanigans on Thursday, Momball weekend starts in earnest Friday night, under the lights, and then all day on Saturday, double elimination, and into Sunday.
The games are only half the carnival; outside the fences of the two fields, each team has a large tent and a large contingent of coolers and children and chaos. Some of the teams designate a mom to go out and yell at the kids for being too wild, and the dads with the red cups for not paying attention.
“I didn’t grow up in Beverly. I didn’t know anybody before I started,” Pyle said as she showed off a photo of her toilet-paper bazooka to her friend, Norrie Gall.
Gall has been playing for years and loving shenanigans night, especially last year, when she was fighting cancer, and her house got tagged for the first time. “My daughter was so excited,” she said. “She came in screaming: ‘We got hit!’”
Chris Goudreau has been a co-coordinator since 2012, and echoed what you hear again and again. “You’re not going to meet every person here, but you’re going to see them at Shaw’s and say hello. But the impact of being on a team is huge. It’s fantastic for camaraderie.”
Many women will play on multiple teams in their Momball career, as the rule is you always play for the school of your oldest child. Elisa Horack played the first year in 1999 and has missed only two Momballs since then. Her career has progressed through a few schools and graduated to an alumni team.
“It’s the best weekend of the year,” she said. “It’s been incredible to watch this mushroom into the best idea we could have had.”
Five years after it began, some women raised the idea of starting a league for people who wanted to keep playing. The first day of the Beverly Women’s Softball League, a hundred women showed up, and it has continued ever since.
Because at the end of the day, the best part of Momball is that it’s a competitive sporting event. Every game has a high energy coming from the field and the stands. Benches become and remain animated. Everyone wants the Momball trophy, which was donated back in 1999 by a guy who ran a karate studio.
This year, the tournament saw some long battles and heated games, and the final came down to the two teams that represent Beverly High School, who made the very mom-decision to split the trophy instead of starting the final game after eight on a school night. That wasn’t happening.
They agreed to just say Beverly won.