On a beautiful spring weekend afternoon, Pitman’s Alcyon Park was filled with Little Leaguers from baseball and softball ready for a full day of tournaments. This time, however, instead of hitting for wins and losses, these young athletes were hitting for the habitat.
The first ever Hitting4Habitat (H4H) tournament was held on April 26 at Alcyon Park in Pitman. The goal for the day was to have participating baseball and softball teams play to boost biodiversity in their local communities.
Hitting4Habitat is a program created by Francesa Mundrick, a Pitman environmental commissioner and a Rowan professor, in partnership with the Pitman Environmental Commission, the Association of New Jersey Environmental Commissions, Pitman Little League, and Pitman Parks and Recreation.
The idea for the tournament came from Mundrick, who is also a frequent attendee of Alcyon Park.
“I spend a lot of time in this park,” she said. “I do a lot of programs in this park. Most of the programs that I offer represent the environmental education for this park.”
The park, which is heavily used for sports and recreation, ended up being a prime location for the H4H event.
“I was walking around one day looking at stuff, and I was looking at the baseball fields and I thought, ‘What if we link something that’s popularized, like sports, with environmental initiatives to reach a new population and to presumably bring in people and get them interested in the environment by linking it with something that’s popular and something that’s done in the park?’” she said. “So I came up with Hitting4Habitat.”
The H4H tournament works in two ways. The first is to install an ongoing biodiverse community garden space at recreational ball fields in local municipalities. The second is to encourage participating players to be environmental stewards by planting native plants at their homes.
“Not only is the environmental commission through the tournament adding the garden behind the baseball fields which will be biodiverse with native plants, but I also really wanted to make sure that the kids playing in the tournament know that not only are they playing for nature and habitat but they’re also playing to change the environment at their own homes,” said Mundrick.
Paul Bially, president of Pitman Little League, echoed Mundrick’s importance of the Hitting4Habitat tournament.
“This is really an amazing day,” he said. “It’s a chance to bring together a variety of different facets of our community, certainly the sports part of it where we are having a wonderful tournament today with a number of families coming out to support and participate and it’s great to see the kids having so much fun, but then we are also bringing the additional element into it with the environmental side of it.
“We spend a lot of time out here on these fields and a lot of times maybe we don’t think about how we tread on them and the effects we can have on the environment,” he added. “So I think it’s important as we teach the kids about sports and goods sportsmanship that it’s also important to think about the other things like caring for the environment and being good leaders in their communities.
“I think these type of projects that Francesa and others have put together are really great to bring people together and bring that awareness,” he added.
To help encourage Little Leaguers playing in the tournament to change the environment at their homes, each player will receive a goodie bag with native plant seeds to create their own home garden for a chance to win a prize.
“They all have native seed packets and they are all welcomed to join something called the H4H Grow Competition, which is something that happens after the tournament,” Mundrick said. “They are going to be asked to grow native plant gardens using the seeds we provided from April to August.”
“They enter to win with photos of their garden to win a prize at the end which is a $500 gift card to Dick’s Sporting Goods,” she said. “I really wanted to make sure that specifically the kids were engaged and involved in environmental stewardship.”
