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City Team A Softball Sister Act

JpBy Donna Ditota/The Post-Standard

On a sunny summer evening, J.P. Ridgeo prepares to launch a pitch on a Burnet Park softball field. A diminutive woman, she tugs at the brim of her baseball cap and peers from behind wire-rimmed sunglasses.

Ridgeo tosses pitch after pitch toward the plate, her teammates vocal and encouraging behind her. She is 60 years old, a multi-year veteran of the softball fields of the Syracuse City Recreational league. But the biggest difference between Ridgeo and the typical batter she faces each week has nothing to do with age. It has everything to do with vocation.

Ridgeo, a Franciscan sister for 35 years, headlines a women’s D-4 slow-pitch softball team that includes three nuns and two former nuns. They played, until their season recently concluded, on Thursday nights at either Burnet or Meachem fields. Sister James Peter (J.P.), Sister Dolly Bush (designated hitter) and SisterDolly Felicidad Cadavona (catcher) are Franciscan nuns who serve the Syracuse community. First baseman Mary Ann Dwyer (aka “Maddog”) and outfielder Margie Kolinski used to be nuns.

Mike Kerwin, the former Syracuse Police Department spokesman who now practices law and volunteers at the Northside Ministries law clinic, sponsors the team. He agreed to write the check to cover costs with one stipulation: He wanted to name the team. A movie aficionado, Kerwin christened his team “Mike’s Bail Bonds,” an homage to the Bad News Bears.

The sisters, he said, embraced the name.

“These are not the nuns of my youth,” Kerwin said. “As I tell my kids, ‘These nuns get the highest compliment. These nuns are cool.’ I’ll be honest with you: Nuns playing softball. I don’t know if you’d want to play them. I don’t know if you’d want to crush them.”

Jp-cyrilApparently, teams want to crush them. Mike’s Bail Bonds finished last in its division with a 1-14 record. Sister J.P. and Sister Dolly insist the team is not as bad as its record indicates. Perhaps, they suggest, the city could institute an over-40 league for women, a concept Joelle Dougherty, who handles city rec league activities, is considering for next season.

For now, the sisters are stuck in a league brimming with youthful vigor. As evidence, Sister Dolly, 61, mentioned the player who slammed a home run against Mike’s Bail Bonds this season.

“I’ve been playing softball for 20 years,” she said. “I never saw any girl hit the ball over the fence.”

“I thought ‘Holy Mackerel!’¤” Sister J.P. said. “God bless her, you know?”

“But really, it can’t be much fun for them either, just whipping the bejeebers out of everybody,” Sister Dolly said.

“It kills you to keep losing all the time,” Sister J.P. said, “but last game we were winning up until the sixth inning. It was our own fault that we blew it.”

Sister J.P and Sister Dolly share a certain conversational shorthand. They met moreDolly2 than 20 years ago, when Sister Dolly struggled to fix a screen in the dormitory where both nuns lived. Sister J.P. asked if she needed assistance and Dolly responded, “Sure, help yourself.”

Sister J.P., a former registered nurse, and Sister Dolly, a former banker, became fast friends. The two currently collaborate at the Franciscan Northside Ministries, where Sister J.P. coordinates a free medical clinic and Sister Dolly runs the free legal clinic.

Kerwin calls the nuns “the real deal – they have the gospel mission down pat.” Both have won acclaim for their work with the city’s poor and marginalized. But both also have a mischievous side.

After one recent softball game, Sister J.P. announced her intention to be buried with her Mets cap. The nuns tell the story of a camping trip a few years ago that barely averted disaster. Sister Dolly blamed Sister J.P.’s “overly confident” way of steering a canoe for the near capsizing that resulted.

“We always get into these Lucy and Ethel predicaments,” Sister Dolly said.

The softball team originated years ago, when Sister J.P. arrived in Syracuse to care for babies at the Gingerbread House, a preschool and daycare center. Sister J.P. had played third base for a Mercy Hospital team in Auburn. After her transfer to Syracuse, she solicited Gingerbread mothers, nuns and former nuns to start a new team.

The team evolved from the Gingerbread House to Nun Better to Poverello (the name of the Northside medical clinic). Over the years, some personnel has shifted. But Sister J.P. and Sister Dolly remain the constants.

 

“I love softball,” Sister J.P. said. “I just love playing, whether I’m good at it or not. I love to play. I love the camaraderie with the girls. Every year we say we’re getting older and we’re not going to do it. And then somebody says, ‘Ooohhhh, we’ll really miss it.’ So we hang in there.”

Their opponents at some point learn the team is infested with nuns. So do the umpires. Donna Nichols, who currently coaches a team in the D-1 league, played against the sisters for years on teams sponsored by the Cornerstone or Pfohl’s.

“When we played against them a number of years ago, someone said, ‘They’re a bunch of nuns,’ and I said, ‘How can you tell? They dress like ball players,’¤” Nichols said. “They played like everybody else. You didn’t treat them like, ‘Oh, poor things, you shouldn’t hurt them.’ I know I didn’t play any different.”

Sister Dolly and Sister J.P. hoped that was the case. They often overhear whispers of their religious affiliation infiltrate opposing teams. Once, a player cursed and a teammate admonished her: “She’s a nun! Watch your mouth!”

The sisters say they aren’t offended, unless someone “uses the F-word,” Sister J.P. said. On the softball field, they prefer to be called “J.P.” and “Dolly.” They prefer to be known as ballplayers.

“I don’t want anybody to feel uncomfortable,” Sister J.P. said.

The sisters join teammates for wings and pizza at area taverns after games. Sometimes, they hit Dolly’s favorite establishment – Abbott’s Custard. Their teammates occasionally request special prayers, most of the time because they want to get pregnant.

“It’s worked like a charm,” Sister Dolly said.

“And then one of the girls said, ‘Don’t even look at me, Sister!’¤” J.P. said. “I was always teasing her: ‘C’mon, have one more!’¤”

The nuns play softball because they love the game. But if their participation shatters stereotypes in the process, they will have achieved a tangential goal.

Donna Nichols was not raised in the Catholic Church. Her only perception of nuns was the habit-wearing, knuckle-cracking depictions she saw on television. The image of Sister J.P. standing on the pitcher’s mound, staring down an opposing batter never occurred to her.

“I never pictured them playing ball,” Nichols said. “I thought they would be more gentle-type people. Like in The Sound of Music, with their hands folded under their cloth. It gave me a more realistic picture of nuns as real people.”

“I think it’s pretty cool that they’re still playing,” said Dougherty. “We used to joke that they’d have angels in the outfield when they’d catch our hits.”