These Warriors Don’t Like Losing Either
All athletes want to inspire, be it with a game-winning homer, a diving catch, or a no-hitter. The 33 men and two women who play on the Warriors softball team are no different. They just have less to work with.
The Warriors—whose full name is the Wounded Warrior Amputee Softball Team—are a traveling collective of veterans from around the country. They all have different wounds—missing legs, arms, eyes— but they share a mission: shattering preconceptions, in themselves as well as in the crowd. “All of us were injured,” says Cody Rice, a 33-year-old
outfielder and former airborne infantry squad leader who lost his right leg to a mine in Afghanistan. “We didn’t think we’d be able to do normal things again. But you get on the team and you realize that there’s nothing holding you back except yourself.”
The only thing holding the team back on this weekend in July 2017 is a nasty losing streak. The Warriors play about 80 games a year, all against able-bodied teams, and they just lost all four at a tournament in Minnesota. They’re looking to get back on track as they walk into Canal Park in Akron, Ohio, to play against a team of local celebrities led by the city’s mayor.
The Warriors have a lust for life on and off the field. Prior to game time, Rice, from Newark, Ohio, banters with teammate Josh Wege (“No leg-y Wege,” as Rice calls him) in the dugout. Seated nearby and cleaning off her batattachable prosthetic arm is Danielle Green from South Bend, Indiana. “All this is very, very therapeutic,” she says. “It’s all about, ‘Let’s see what I can do, how high I can take it.’”
Green’s first love was basketball. She played guard for the University of Notre Dame in the mid-’90s and went on to enlist in the Army in 2003. A year later,
seven weeks after marrying her husband, Green was on security duty at a National Police Station in Baghdad. “We got this eerie feeling that something would happen,” she recalls. She climbed to the roof, and a rocketpropelled grenade whizzed by her, exploding a barricade. “It clipped me, knocking me down to my right side.”
She woke up in a hospital bed with her sergeant standing at her side. “I said, ‘Sarge, is my arm missing?’” says Green. She was asking about her left arm, the one that had tossed so many basketballs through so many hoops. “And he said, ‘Yeah, it’s gone.’ I broke down for a second or two.” Her sergeant did have one piece of good news: “He said they went back to the rooftop and got my wedding rings.”
At Canal Park, it’s the bottom of the fourth, with the game tied at nine apiece and runners on first and third. Cody Rice is at the plate. The first pitch, a strike. Rice readjusts his stance and cleans his bat against his prosthetic leg. He smacks the next pitch into center field. The runners score, and Rice races around the bases for an inside-the-park home run. He’s greeted in the dugout by jubilant high fives all around. The Warriors go on to win the game.
“What do you think?” Coach Bucky Weaver asks a young fan waiting for an autograph afterward. “Not bad for missing a couple of parts.”