By Steve Huffman
shuffman@salisburypost.com
When Jenny Fox moved from Yorkshire, England, to Rowan County in 1976, she didn’t know a baseball from a beachball.
She’d never seen a baseball game in her life.
“I didn’t know the first thing about the sport,” Fox said.
That changed the following year when friends took her and her husband, Brian, to Newman Park to see the Rowan County American Legion baseball team play.
Fox has since been a regular at the games.
“We sat on the third-base line and we’ve been there ever since,” she said.
Fox’s husband died four years ago, but she continues going to the games and will be traveling to Sumter, S.C., today to see Rowan’s start in the Southeast Regional tonight.
Fox has two children ó a son who lives in Arizona and a daughter who lives in Morganton. But here in Rowan County, the other fans of the Rowan legion team make up her surrogate family.
“Every year, you get to know the parents and the friendships just continue,” Fox said. “We’re like one big family.”
Fox, 68, will be driving to Sumter today with two much younger Rowan fans: cousins Drew Sechler and Brent Yost, both of whom are in college. Sechler is a summer intern with the Salisbury Post.
“I think their parents feel better knowing they’re just a room or two away from me at the motel,” Fox said of their overnight stays.
She said the fact that she’s traveling to South Carolina to see the Legion team isn’t unusual. Fox noted that in the late-’90s, when the squad traveled to Oregon to play, she and her husband made the trip.
Fox said every Legion team is different, made up of a slew of young people with a variety of personalities and talents.
What does she like best about this year’s team?
“There are no superstars, they’re just a team,” Fox said. “That speaks well for the team, that usually means they’re going a long ways.”
She said she’s on a first-name basis with most of the players, and enjoys them all.
“They’re all good kids,” Fox said. “They’re fine young men.”
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Rhonda Hiskey doesn’t have sons playing for the Rowan Legion team. But she expects that to change in the not-too-distant future.
Hiskey has two sons, Eli, 8, and Luke, 5, that she and her husband, Michael, take to almost every Legion game.
“My boys just live for baseball,” said Hiskey, a teacher at Morgan Elementary School.
She said that when her sons go out in the yard to throw baseballs, they don’t pretend to be major leaguers playing for the Yankees or Red Sox. Instead, Eli and Luke pretend to be members of the Rowan Legion team.
They know all the players by name, Hiskey said, and call out the player they’re pretending to be on any particular afternoon.
“They say, ‘When I play Legion baseball … ‘ ” Hiskey said. “That’s what they aspire to.”
Alas, the Hiskey family isn’t going to be able to make it to tonight’s game in Sumter because Eli and Luke have Little League games they’re playing. The family plans to leave Friday to drive to South Carolina for second-round games.
In a like sense, the Hiskeys couldn’t go to Greenville last week when Rowan won the state championship because they were vacationing in Washington, D.C. Hiskey said that as they were walking across the National Mall there in Washington, her sons were more interested in learning how the Rowan Legion team was faring than in taking in the latest artifacts at the Smithsonian.
Sechler (that aforementioned Post intern) is Hiskey’s cousin.
“The boys kept saying, ‘Call Drew and see who won,’ ” Hiskey said. “They were more interested in that than taking in the sights.”
Hiskey said members of the Legion team know her sons by name just like her sons know the names of the players.
“They love the whole team,” Hiskey said. “They’re all so polite to my boys.”