SWSAD 50th Annual Regional Tournament

 · Hosted by Southwest Softball Association for the Deaf

SWSAD, for more than forty-nine years, has hosted annual softball tournament where all six or more states come together to play for the southwest region title. Oklahoma’s beautiful city of Tulsa got to be the host city for SWSAD’s 50th year anniversary on June 14-18, 2017, a perfect tribute for Tulsa. The last time Tulsa hosted SWSAD was in 1987!  Jennifer Nix, SWSAD conference chair, pulled local organizational support for the first time ever for SWSAD!  She did a fantastic job! She set a tone for future SWSAD events.  Oklahoma Association of the Deaf was honored to be asked to be a part of the 50th anniversary SWSAD.  We hosted the Kids Zone for 3 days. It was fun!  Other Tulsa Community Organizations include support from Tulsa Community College ASL Education, and TSHA. TSHA, an interpreting agency, worked with SLRS and EAI - 2 other Oklahoma Interpreting Agencies to pull interpreters for SWSAD, which is also a first time ever thing! There were qualified, certified interpreters on the field to interpret for the umpires and deaf players and coaches!  Everyone was excited and pleased with all the planning that Nix did. We are pretty proud of her too. All interpreters, committee members, managers, coaches, and team members are volunteers who give their time to making events successful-THANK YOU!  OAD had several volunteers as well and we couldn’t have pulled off the Kid Zone without them!

Many thanks to Roger Smith for spending his weekend taking the pictures for us! Memories are important, and it was one more load off SWSAD’s shoulders, to have someone from our community doing pictures. Roger is an amazing volunteer for TSHA and always stepping forward to help with deaf events.