Playing Baseball on Rügen

For our end of season holiday this year we went to the beautiful island of Rugen. It was a fairly subdued and relaxing trip by our standards, but was a nice change from our normal busy lives. I am a baseball player and member of a Mainz Baseball Club and am  writing a short summary of something that happened on our end of season adventures in Rugen.  Our club is located in the Rhineland-Palatinate in the city of Mainz, and although baseball is not a huge sport in Germany our club is one of the biggest in the country.  2007 has been a very big year for us as we won our first and only German Championship - and when the season came to its wonderful climax, we were ready to celebrate.

I had never been to Rugen before but many of the other players had visited here on many occasions with friends and family members. Everybody was saying that it was a quiet and relaxing place, and this was fine by me. Although sporting teams are somewhat infamous for having rowdy and drunken end of season trips, we were a fairly old team and most of us were more than happy to leave our partying days behind us.  What I had in mind was a nice gentle break with the team mates I had grown to know and love over the course of the last three seasons. No one really expected us to win the title this year, and I put a lot of it down to the great bond that we had developed among our team.

There are many great memories that I have from this end of season trip, from when we first booked into our Baltic Sea Hotel (Ostsee Hotel) to when we astonished some of the locals by getting out some of our baseball gear for a quick game on one of the beaches. I don't know if anyone had ever played baseball on Rugen before, some of the stares we were getting certainly made it seem like we were doing something extremely novel and unexpected. When you were a baseball player in Germany you were kind of used to being the odd man out.  Most people associated baseball with America, and the popularity of the sport anywhere in Germany - or anywhere in Europe for that matter - was really quite low.

The best part of our little beach game of baseball was when a couple of the locals started to join in with the game. We had tried to pick an isolated stretch of beach so that no one would end up being hit by a ball, but the people seemed to come to us. After a couple of hours a few tourists who were staying in the Hotel auf Rügen and a couple of locals fleshed out our little game into a full scale beach baseball championship. This has left a lot of great memories and was a perfect way to finish up our triumphant season.