HESSTON – On any given day throughout the school year, members of the Hesston College baseball team could be found preparing for their season. From practices to the weight room to games, not to mention academics, college athletes have a lot of demand placed upon them.
But the 2025-26 Larks had a standing date for Monday evenings. That’s when they headed next door to Schowalter Villa to play beanbag baseball with residents in health care and assisted living.
The game is simple. The baseball “diamond” is a cornhole board with additional holes for singles, doubles, triples, homeruns and outs. Participants split into teams and players take turns “at bat.” They have three tries to get a hit or make an out by throwing their beanbag into a hole. If none of the bags find a hole on the board, it’s three strikes and out.
The evenings were marked with laughter, cheers, conversation and a healthy dose of friendly competition.
“A couple of years ago, my own grandfather moved into a retirement community and introduced me to beanbag baseball,” said Kyle Olson, head coach of the Larks baseball program. “When telling me stories about the residents playing and how much fun they were having, I immediately thought about Schowalter Villa. The overlap with us being a baseball team was just too easy to pass up in terms of opportunity for our guys to interact with the residents while doing something that could be fun for both organizations.”
Schowalter Villa’s staff was on board, but Olson feared it might be a tough sell for college-age young men.
“Convincing 20-year-olds to get out of their dorm for an hour on Monday nights to do something like this is not always the easiest. After the first couple of weeks, the guys were coming back with joy on their faces and stories about the fun they’d had. It became a thing that they got to do instead of something they had to do.”
For some of the players, the evenings helped fill some of the gaps of missing their own grandparents.
“I grew up at a distance from my grandpa, but I really looked up to him,” said Colby Simkins, a sophomore from Onaga, Kan. “When he passed away, I didn’t get to say goodbye, and I didn’t have closure from that. Some of the residents here have reminded me of him in different ways. That’s helped to bring some closure, and to have that kind of interaction again has been nice for me.”
“As someone who has lost almost all of my grandparents, this experience has been really great for me,” said Jackson Lambert, a freshman from Spanish Fort, Ala.
In early April the team invited Schowalter residents to be their special guests at a home game. Members of the team helped push wheelchairs the two blocks to Oswald Field where they were greeted by Larks lining the sidewalk. Residents were situated behind the home plate backstop and provided with popcorn. Two residents threw out a ceremonial first pitch.
“The guys have embraced this as a program standard,” Olson said, “and I can’t wait to see how it continues to impact our program in the future.”
