Abstract
Professional athletes are loved and hated for what they are paid to do. For amateur athletes, the chance to complete their lifelong dreams of playing on a sports team has been made true by the sport of slowpitch softball. This thesis features first-hand accounts of seven players who have been playing for as little as two years to as many as 30 years and examines why these men and women play. The author has played of dozens of different slowpitch teams in the past six years and uses his own experiences as a starting point for the article. In a sport that, for the most part, doesn't offer monetary incentive for these athletes, what is that makes them risk losing their source of income because of injury. This article will show that it is a combination of factors that make these men and women play on a nightly basis during the warmer months.
