Local students honored at Polar Park for poetry submissions about baseball

WORCESTER – Children and families gathered on the Berm of Polar Park to kick off the day for the National Baseball Poetry Festival. The youngsters, prepping for their own big performances, overlooked the field as the Woo Sox players warmed up for their afternoon game.

NBPF committee members Pam Gemme and Karen Sharpe led things off by introducing the poetry contest as part of the NBPF. There were 160 total submissions in the youth contest, including students at Burncoat Middle School (Worcester), Worcester East Middle School, Forest Grove Middle School (Worcester), Leicester Middle School, Hudson High School and several from out of state, like New Hampshire and Rhode Island.

The turnout reflected that NBPF accomplished one of their main goals, in spreading the love of poetry to the youth and encouraging participation in the arts.

"This year I'm fortunate enough to teach creative writing and so I had a ready group of kids who wanted to write," Carol Hobbs, a Hudson High English teacher, said. "When the kids were done, I had them submit, and four of the kids from Hudson placed."

Hobbs described the process of implementing the poetry contest into the poetry unit in her class, taking the opportunity to look at famous baseball poems and even explore the history of women in baseball and the context of that in today's world.

Sarah Sanders at Burncoat Middle did a similar lesson with her students. Sanders is on the NBPF organizing committee and wrote a curriculum utilizing the contest for teachers to use in their own lesson plans. Being in Worcester, she focused on the excitement of the Woo Sox and bringing that into the classroom.

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"There's a lesson built into our curriculum about 'Casey at the Bat,' and it's a national curriculum we use but 'Casey at the Bat' is the most famous baseball poem of all time, and it was written right here in Worcester so it's kind of a natural marriage between the two – baseball and poetry," Sanders said.

The event certainly does marry the two and brings in a family aspect that is hard to turn down. Watch your child read their poem at Polar Park and then stick around for the game with the whole family – it's the perfect opportunity to grow the whole community around the common factors of baseball and poetry.

Catherine and Lorelei Douglas, sisters that attend Burncoat Middle School, were both recognized for their poetry submissions. They both play soccer and enjoy sports and were not necessarily passionate about poetry to begin with. However, through the chance to submit poems at school for the contest, they both tried their hand at writing and were pleasantly surprised when they won.

"My teacher assigned this, and I don't really like poetry or writing at all, and I was thinking 'I'm not going to win,' so I tried my best and I put it into a Canva poster and sent it to my teacher and then I won," Catherine said. "I was like, 'Wow I did that!'"

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Her sister agreed. "I'm not really good at writing but I actually enjoyed writing this, maybe because it was about baseball and sports, and I like sports. I did not think I was going to win out of all the kids," Lorelai said.

Another drawing factor that Sanders noticed was the interest in writing and baseball separately. Maybe a student is interested in one or the other but gets this opportunity to see both at play and forms a new interest.

"The idea that poetry could lead to a career path as could baseball, those are real jobs you could do someday, I think it's really cool for kids to see it up close and personal," Sanders said.

This article originally appeared on Gardner News: National Baseball Poetry Festival welcomes youth poets at Polar Park