Seniors Still Swinging--at Home Plate : Softball: Golden Girls league in Virginia gives a powerful boost to the self-esteem of older women, players and fitness experts agree.

Hazel (Hurricane) Parker digs in at home plate and shoulders a bat, preparing to take her swings as the 69-year-old cleanup hitter for one of the nation’s best over-40 women’s softball teams.

She plays with a brace on her arthritic left knee, and a substitute runs the bases in her place.

But her swing is strong, and she regularly sends the ball into the far reaches of the scruffy suburban softball field where the five-team Golden Girls intramural league plays twice a week. She also plays catcher and first base.

“We have a good time out there, but we play to win,” said Parker, removing the black, wrap-around sunglasses that make her appear formidable.

The Golden Girls league is an example of growing interest in athletics among older people and a powerful boost to the self-esteem of older women, players and fitness experts said.

“I thought, ‘Gee, I don’t know if I can do this,’ ” said the league’s president, Bettie Pell, 53. “But joining up was really one of the best things I’ve done for myself lately. I met a tremendous group of women and had fun.”

Her only lament is not being old enough to compete in the Senior Olympics, held every other year for athletes 55 and older.

A team made up of the Golden Girls’ best players was the defending champion going into June’s competition in Baton Rouge, La., but lost to a Michigan team in the championship game. The average age of this year’s Golden Girls Olympic squad was 58.

At each Olympics, sponsored by the National Senior Sports Organization, more women’s teams show up, and the competition is stiffer as more communities form leagues for older women, participants said.

“The truth is that an awful lot of older adults have not taken good care of themselves and are in pretty rotten shape,” said York E. Onnen, director of program development for the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports.

“It is such a refreshing thing to see women getting involved in exercise and sports programs, many for the first time in their lives.”

Many of the Golden Girls players are novices, but others are lifelong athletes or women who played when they were young, before families and jobs interfered.

Often women who might have continued playing softball or other sports into middle age were held back by a social stigma that competitive physical activity was somehow unbecoming, Onnen said.

“That is definitely changing. We are very proud to be out there playing,” Pell said.

Parker played softball avidly as a child, hitting and fielding with her brothers and their friends on a farm in North Carolina. She didn’t play for many years before joining the Golden Girls.

“It sure feels good out to be out there,” she said.

She is not the oldest player in the league. Janet Hull, 75, drives 50 miles from Baltimore to play first base.

The 4-year-old league has grown from 16 players its first year to 104 this season, said spokeswoman Toni Letaw.

The league sends its best players to a variety of tournaments each year. In more than a dozen tournaments since 1990, the Golden Girls have placed second on three occasions and won the rest, Letaw said.

No one compiles statistics for senior women’s leagues, but Letaw believes the Golden Girls may have the nation’s winningest record.

The league uses special rules aimed at preventing injuries, said Aubrey Jones, coach of a league team called Mint Condition. Another team calls itself the Pop Tarts.

“We try to prevent contact and collision at this age,” he said.

The modified softball rules include a ban on sliding and allow players to overrun the bases.

Players greet mistakes with good-natured heckling.

When one woman whiffed a fat pitch on a recent afternoon, several players shouted at once: “Hazel would have hit that!”