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Former West Side resident returns home to be inducted into sixth softball hall of fame

Date: 12/12/2014

By Angelique Fiske
angelique@thereminder.com

WEST SPRINGFIELD – Softball has brought Diane Schumacher around the world, to the sport’s debut at the Olympics to throw the first pitch and to six hall of fame inductions.

But at the beginning of all of that was her West Springfield Parks and Recreation youth softball league.

Schumacher, now the athletic director at Howard Community College in Columbia, MD, was welcomed home and inducted into the Massachusetts Amateur Softball Association Hall of Fame on Nov. 29 at the Sheraton-Framingham Hotel.

She is known for her dominance as a pitcher and at the plate, hitting .329 in her career.

Schumacher grew up in West Springfield, attended Cathedral High School and eventually went to Springfield College for her undergraduate degree. Although she has been out of Massachusetts for nearly 40 years, coming home meant a great deal to her.

“I did get emotional. Part of it was closure on a career,” Schumacher said. “I bought three tables. I wanted my coaches to be there. To me, it was an opportunity to thank them. It’s surreal.”

The coaches from her past, including Diane Potter from Springfield College and Ralph Raymond from the Raybestos Brackettes, attended the ceremony. Schumacher said she was happy to have them there and as a part of her career, but that there was one coach who had a particularly profound impact on her life: her father.

Back in the days of youth league softball, he would pick up and drop off a station wagon full of players to and from practices and games.

Some of the girls’ parents were not crazy about their daughters’ playing on the team, but he wanted to make sure they made it, she recalled.

After the car was emptied, Schumacher and her father would get an ice cream, just the two of them in a peaceful moment after the dust of a chaotic carpool had settled.

This is something that engrained itself into Schumacher’s perspective on the game she loves.

“It helped form an attitude to keep it fun,” she said. “You never see a sad person eating ice cream.”

Beyond that, her father believed in her.

“He was instrumental. He always said I was different. I never understood what he meant. He saw -something in me,” Schumacher said.

That “something” began when her brother’s baseball coach asked her to field ground balls instead of watching from the bleachers. The coach offered to make a trade to get her on the team.

Though Schumacher never did play on that team, she went on to play for the Westfield Whips for five years and the Raybestos Brackettes in Stratford, Conn. Schumacher played with the Brackettes for 11 years (1976-86), winning eight National Amateur Softball Association Championships.

Schumacher medalled in the 1978 and 1983 Pan American games, won a gold medal in 1978 World Championship Games in San Salvador and won the Amateur Softball Association’s Sportswoman of the Year award the same year.

With her long list of recognitions and awards, Schumacher has been nothing but grateful.

“It’s been a wonderful life. I’ve been blessed and I created opportunities for myself,” Schumacher said. “I just was a kid that loved to play. That’s all you needed to do was let me play.”