A Tuesday night slice of life: senior volleyball at Hart Park

Years ago, a divorced-and-widowed group began playing Sunday volleyball games at Eucalyptus Park in Anaheim. Many of the members have now gravitated to Hart Park for friendly games on Tuesday nights, affiliated with the Orange Senior Center. Courtesy of Luca Evans

Larry Hattern will not hesitate to dive to save a volleyball. He backpedals across a sand court in Hart Park, delivering quip after quip to his teammates and opponents. He races for one-handed digs and delivers pinpoint serves.

He is also 86 years old.

At 7 p.m. on Tuesday evenings, when every surrounding light is seemingly shut off except for those illuminating the volleyball and nearby tennis courts, when the only supplementary source of light comes from a couple of stars twinkling above, a small group of middle-aged adults and senior citizens gather at Hart Park. They’re an a band of friends affiliated with a program sponsored by the Orange Senior Center who play game after game of volleyball.

Really, though, it’s more for the social aspect, said group member Russ Jansen.

Eight of them showed up on Feb. 11. One brought a speaker, and Hattern said he wanted to play bluegrass music. He got his wish at the beginning, as the group played their first set to the twang of “We’re Steppin’ Out Tonight” by Bobby Hicks. But Linda Jansen, Russ’ wife, mentioned she doesn’t like country, and soon after, the music switched to rock - “Panama” by Van Halen.

Hattern and the Jansens are on the same team, and after a point, Hattern quips with Linda: “You don’t like country music? And he married you?”

The Jansens began playing volleyball in 2001, with many of this same group, every other Sunday at Eucalyptus Park in Anaheim. But they weren’t both Jansens at that time. The two met, along with many of their volleyball-mates, at a Catholic church in a divorced-and-widowed group.

“We fell in love, got married, there’s the short version,” Russ Jansen said with a chuckle.

Russ, perhaps 30 to 40 years younger than Hattern, engages in constant banter with his elder from nearly the moment the games begin. “What, you’re getting old?” he asks Jansen after the former misses a dig. At one point, Claudia Bosco, 68, who joined the group in 2016, yelled out the score from the opposite side of the net. Hattern asked her to speak up. “Some of us are hard of hearing,” Hattern said.

Jansen leaned in and yelled, “What?!!”

Once a year, Eucalyptus Park would have a picnic with a priest that would give mass. Hattern recalled “one of the guys” coming over and finding out that Hattern was not Christian, because Hattern told him he wouldn’t be attending mass.

“He looked at me and he said, ‘Well, how’d you get in this group?’” Hattern said. “And I said, ‘Well I snuck in when nobody was looking.’ And he almost fell on the floor laughing.”

Eventually, the group moved to their current stomping grounds at Hart Park. But after one summer eight years ago, when the park was overrun with kids freshly out of school, Hattern and the crew were suddenly out of a place to play. Thus, he had the idea to talk with the Orange Senior Center to set up a scheduled program.

“I said, ‘Hey, we’re a bunch of older people, we’re not sitting around watching TV, is there anything you can do for us?’” Hattern said.

On this particular Tuesday night, they played eight back to back games with less than a five minute break in between. Hattern seemed to barely break a sweat. Bosco, who worked for Kaiser Permanente, listed off a laundry list in between volleys of the benefits of playing outdoor volleyball at an older age. It’s good for cholesterol, blood pressure, heart disease, a lower chance of osteoporosis and depressio, he said.

“I consider us lucky because we are able to and we want to (play),” Bosco said. “It’s easier to sit at home with a cat.”

It’s rather difficult to imagine any of them sitting in an armchair stroking a cat. Hattern seemingly ignores the brace on his right leg in his movements and his volleys are returned back and forth across the net ten times. As Bosco rejoins play, she tosses a final line back over her shoulder in my direction.

“See, seniors, it’s no longer rocking chair, it’s rock-and-roll.”