Even after the tragic hardships they endured, the Bledsoe family was determined that wouldn’t be the end of Daryll’s run. So, they organized a memorial co-ed softball tournament in his honor, Dingers for Daryll.
A change to a fixture could ruffle a few feathers. Thankfully, Mitchell and Mullaney feel reactions from the in and around the nest have been positive.
“What I didn’t know at the time in 2007 is that it would take 10 years of outreach to people to finally see it implemented in 2017,” Elam said. “The whole time I felt like I was one day away from a major breakthrough.”
“We’re very united as a team, and that really helps when we’re competing,” Pfister said. “We just stay in our own little bubble, and we just support each other.”
“Food is like the love language of the world. No matter what culture or language you speak you can still come together and enjoy one common thing, food. I want to give as much as I can away because I know I can make a lot of smiles happen.”
“We’ve been working really hard this season, and the previous semester as well to get to this point,” Kelly said. “The credit all goes to the players. They’re all really passionate and they put in their work.”
“He’s the hardest worker in the room and it’s been that way all summer,” Bradley said. “I’m not surprised at all that he qualified for state.”
“Because of her frailty and just the number of open-heart surgeries that she had to have, we spent a lot of time reading to her,” Layman said. “There were days when we couldn’t hold her, when she was ventilated, when she was recovering. Books really became the tool that we used to bond with our daughter.”
For some reason, the NFL seems to disagree with me. Every NFL player on every NFL team walks out of their locker room and onto the field each game day with a stain on their jersey. Sometimes it’s super hard to see. Sometimes it’s pretty darn easy to see. Other times the stain is so obvious that it’s hard to look away, but football fans generally just miss it or ignore it completely. I can’t miss that stain. That stain is the NFL ownership group.
“[When] we’re looking at scheduling and things of that nature, you are competing against other, more established meets that are on the schedule,” Wheatley said. “Our sport is a little different from other sports, again, it’s you’re at the mercy of what’s going on that weekend, and we have come up against a couple weekends where there are some established meets that attract other teams.”
