By Chris Coates ('04) / Photography by Drew Reynolds ('97)

The pitcher underhands a cabbage-sized softball at the brawny batter, who taunts him in a thick South Side accent. The batter swings. The bat makes contact with a pitchy “phump,” sending the plump ball spiraling into the outfield for a hit. The crowd roars; score one for the team in red.

It could be a bright summer afternoon on any ball field of Cicero, Grant Park, or Wilmette. Except for the palm trees. And the mountains. And the mustard-colored smog.

Welcome to Los Angeles and Windy City Softball, a scrappy league started four years ago by an ex-pat Chicagoan and Columbia alum who wanted to introduce the City of Angels to the Windy City tradition of 16-inch softball—a peculiarly Midwestern form of the game played with no gloves and a curious, extra-large ball. Today, the co-ed league has more than 15 teams and 200 players, the bulk of them Columbia alumni and Chicago natives.

Da players (from left): Ross Flader (’05), Peter Woods (’05), Brandon L’Herault (’01), Nick Sheptak (’05), Dan Moore (’05) (with bat), Wilfred Gelin (’05), Brett Bulatek (’05)

“It started as our enclave to forget about the L.A. stuff, like the traffic or job worries,” says league founder Louie Pradt (’96), a screenwriter and the self-designated “league commissioner” who also hoists the Chicago city flag before each game. “This is our little neighborhood.”

It’s also a place for 50 or so Columbia alumni, as well as current students in the college’s Semester in L.A. program, to gain remarkable access to fellow working professionals in the film and television business. The league boasts a growing list of actors, writers, production assistants and producers, according to Sarah Schroeder (’00), Columbia’s west coast director of alumni relations and stewardship, who plays second base for the Sting. “Everyone here is in the industry,” Schroeder says.

Sports at Columbia? “Zero fraternities, sororities, football teams, homecoming games. Zero colleges like Columbia,” brags a banner in the lobby of the college’s main building, the Alexandroff Campus Center. The implication being, if you’re interested in athletics, you won’t find ’em here. Read more...

For Columbia—a college without an athletics department—the idea that its students would turn to sports is admittedly a little ironic, says film and video alum Rachel Krukowski (’04), a player on the Dillengers who took part her senior year in Semester in L.A., Columbia’s five-week immersion program for film students, housed on the CBS studio lot. “Once I moved out here, the first thing I did was join this league,” she says. “It’s kind of hard to meet people out here.”

Krukowski is now a post-production production assistant on the upcoming talk show Moochers, where she works with another Windy City player and fellow Columbia graduate, Derrick Geyer (’04). Pradt says that’s not uncommon. “Networking happens,” he says. “We’ve had people [land] their jobs from this.”

Socializing was the primary reason Pradt, a former Semester in L.A. coordinator and Columbia screenwriting instructor, created Windy City back in 2002. At the time, he was playing the more common 12-inch softball for an L.A. league. The locals were fiercely competitive and petty arguments were the norm, he says, and he didn’t really enjoy playing in that environment. Pradt recalls thinking, “This is not the way the game is supposed to be played,” and he soon found himself longing for the more amiable, 16-inch variety he grew up with in Glenn Ellyn, Illinois.

Like many Chicagoans, Pradt regarded 16-inch as the de facto form of the game, played in pubic schools and neighborhood leagues throughout the region, and affectionately immortalized by the late Chicago Tribune columnist Mike Royko.

Pradt wanted to bring the game to L.A., so he pitched the idea to a few players from his old league and some staffers at Semester in L.A., who eventually recruited 30 players. The game was a hit. “Every season since then, we’ve been adding players and adding teams,” Pradt says.

These days, Windy City has 15 teams with such Chicagocentric names as the Sears Power, Team Red Line, and Old Style. They play a pair of 13-week seasons each year on two diamonds in the Studio City district of Los Angeles.

Even after nine seasons in L.A., about eight out of ten players in the league still have some sort of Chicago connection, Schroeder says. “Over the years people started bringing friends,” she adds. “It’s really grown quickly.”

The league has also grown through the endless tide of Columbia students coming from Chicago for the Semester in L.A. program, which has its “campus” on the CBS Studio Center lot a mile or so from the Studio City field. Many Semester in L.A. students join the league for the benefit of finding people with similar interests in a city not known as an easy place to make connections, says Brandon L’Herault (’01). “When I first came out here, I really didn’t know anybody. This was a place to meet people from Chicago.”

L’Herault, who plays for Team Ditka, now works as a music video producer in Santa Monica and wants to help other Columbia students find their way on the West Coast. “I invited everybody on the team to my office,” he says, to show them firsthand how things worked in the industry.

For students, that interaction is a major advantage, says Film and Video alum Dan Curran (’90), a former Columbia teacher who now works as a screenwriter and plays softball for the Blues Brothers. “I wish [the league] was [in] place when I was a student. You meet a lot of new people,” says Curran, who moved to Los Angeles in 1997. “That’s the great thing about Semester in L.A. That’s the great thing about this league.”

Krukowski agrees, adding that Windy City helps her remember where she comes from. “It’s a piece of Chicago,” she says. “It’s a piece of home.”

Chris Coates (’04) is a staff reporter for the San Fernando Valley Business Journal in Woodland Hills, California, covering healthcare, public companies, and tourism in Los Angeles. He served as editor of The Columbia Chronicle from 2003 to 2004.  Los Angeles-based photographer Drew Reynolds (’97) revels in mixing old and new photographic processes using his 4 x 5 and/or digital SLR cameras. Some of his clients include: Forbes, XLR8R, Complex Magazine, Thrill Jockey Records, and MCA Records.