Your Sport: National Adult Baseball Association lets grownups play like kids – Fayetteville Observer

Like a lot of the guys gathered at the baseball field at Seventy-First High School on Sunday, Justin Hendrickson could have hung up his glove and cleats a long time ago.

But the 33-year-old Hendrickson and the rest of the players in the National Adult Baseball Association of the Carolinas league, just aren’t ready to let those big league dreams go.

“Everybody, in the back of their mind I believe, is still chasing that dream that they still want to be a pro baseball player when they grow up,” Hendrickson said. “They just don’t realize we’re all grown up yet.”

Aaron Parker helped found the NABA, an adult wood bat baseball league that’s now in its fifth season.

Parker was part of a team playing out of Raleigh and wanted a chance to play ball without the travel.

“That travel got to be much,” Parker said. “We had to go to Greensboro and everywhere else. We took that team, started a league here with four teams.”

The league has now grown to include five teams.

Four of its teams – the Sandlot Assassins, Lake Monsters, Marlins and Indians. The Bennettsville A’s of South Carolina round out the league.

The teams compete every Sunday through the season, getting in about 20 regular season games before finishing with a best-of-three postseason tournament.

“We don’t have a fall league, so we like to stretch it out,” Parker said with a laugh at the lengthy playoff format.

Like Parker, who plays for the Assassins, Josh Darder has been playing in the league since the first season.

The 27-year-old recently moved to Raleigh but continues to make the trip down to Fayetteville each week to play for the Indians.

“Everyone comes out here to win,” Darder said. “Teams have gotten better and better. It’s great when you have a league where the players are coming out and want to play well. All the teams are pretty serious.”

The players said the league has grown, not only in size, but in quality of play since its inception in 2012.

“It was a lot less competitive then,” Hendrickson said. “It was more so just something to do. Now, the league and the teams have all gotten much stronger.”

Jon Hall, the only coach in the league who doesn’t also double as a player, said potential players have approached teams about joining, a departure from when teams had to go hunting for players.

“The word’s gotten out some, but it needs to get out a little bit more than it what it has,” Hall said. “That’s drawn a lot of the guys into it.”

NABA has even drawn a few recent high school graduates who are transitioning to compete at the next level.

Michael Acuna spent the first half of the summer with the Marlins before returning to Texas to join his junior college team.

At 19, he’s one of the league’s youngest players.

“This league is helping me develop my skills and sharpen my mechanics a little bit more than what I learned back in high school,” Acuna said. “I’ve learned a lot here.”

Hendrickson said he’s played some slow-pitch softball, a common move for former baseball players, but gets more out of the baseball experience.

“It’s so much rewarding to go 1-for-4 in baseball than it is 3-for-4 in softball,” Hendrickson said. “It gives you more satisfaction to know that you can still do it.”

Whatever stats players tally through the season, Hall said the players are still there to enjoy the game so many of them played growing up.

“These guys, they might be adults, but they’re not much different from a bunch of 12 year olds,” Hall said. “When they get on field, it’s all about enjoying it and having fun.”

Staff writer Jaclyn Shambaugh can be reached at shambaughj@fayobserver.com or 609-0651.