The Gift of Speed Pitch

Written by: Kate Snyder, Development and Donor Communications Coordinator

One of the many fun "things to do" at A Flavor of the East End was the Speed Pitch activity. That's right. When we have a baseball-themed event, we take it seriously. This included renting an inflatable speed pitch booth.

The basic premise is simple. You throw two pitches and the machine clocks and displays your speed each time. Before you make your third throw, you guess how fast it will be. If you're within five miles per hour, you win!

What do you win? Well, in our case, you won entries into a drawing for round trip tickets on Southwest Airlines. The male and female guests with the fastest overall throw also won additional entries and the competition was stiff.

(Let me say as a side note that I now appreciate major league pitchers even more. I gave it my all and I think my top speed was somewhere in the upper 20s. Seriously. How on earth do they get it up to 90 mph?)

We drew the winning name in the week following the event and contacted our winner, a young woman who attended the event as a guest of one of our sponsors. And here's where we got a wonderful surprise back in the form of an email from our winner.

"YAY!!! This absolutely made my week! (actually more than my week!). My husband and I had literally just decided we couldn’t go on vacation this year so now this has made a vacation possible! YAHOO!!!!!!"

How's that for awesome? It adds a smile to my day to know that the winner was so excited about her prize!