FWS ceremony to honor Happy Chef, Junker¹s
Two teams helped build Mankato into hotbed for fastpitch softball

By Brian Ojanpa

Free Press Staff Writer
NORTH MANKATO ‹ It will be a commemoration of two high-achieving teams, an
old-timers¹ game minus the game.
Rick Junker (left) of Junker¹s Bar & Grill and Tom Frederick Sr. of Happy
Chef Restaurant will be among those honored Friday with members of their
squads at the North American Fastpitch World Series at Caswell Park.

The Mankato community¹s most accomplished men¹s fastpitch teams, Happy Chef
and Junker¹s, will be honored 7 p.m. Friday in a special reunion ceremony at
Caswell Park.

The recognition event for the two defunct squads will be part of the 10-day
North American Fastpitch Association (NAFA) World Series that has attracted
more than 120 men¹s teams from the United States, Canada and Japan.

³Actually, we were going to play a game, but we couldn¹t get enough of our
guys together,² says Rick Junker, whose sponsorship of Junker¹s began in
1991 and lasted 10 years.

Junker expects up to a dozen former Junker¹s players to be on hand Friday,
while longtime sponsor Tom Frederick Sr. anticipates larger numbers for the
Happy Chef squad he sponsored for 20 years.

In its heyday, Happy Chef was one of the top teams in the world, placing as
high as fifth twice (1980 and 1996) in the International Softball Congress
World Tournament.

Junker¹s achievements included placing second in the Class AAA division of
the NAFA World Series in 2001, and fourth in the American Softball
Association national tournament in 1995.

Both teams folded at the turn of the century, and pretty much for the same
reason ‹ money.

³It got to be a pretty hefty budget,² Junker says. ³If you wanted to go out
and play the big boys, you had to go to Illinois, Kansas, Iowa...²

And as the supply of elite pitchers grew more scarce as the popularity of
the game waned in the United States, teams found themselves locked in an
arms race. The best pitchers, often from fastpitch-intensive New Zealand and
Australia, commanded hefty salaries.

Happy Chef was fortunate. It had Leroy Jolstad, a 6-foot-7 hurler from the
southwestern Minnesota town of Cottonwood.

Frederick figures Jolstad racked up more than 700 wins in his long career
with Happy Chef, and on Friday Frederick will present him with one of his
jerseys encased in glass.

Frederick says the fifth-place finish at the world tourney in 1996 was his
biggest highlight with a team that eventually sent nine players into the
Minnesota Softball Hall of Fame.

³We were always a contender, always a team to be reckoned with. Very seldom
did we get blown out,² Frederick says.

Junker¹s personal highlights are twofold: the team¹s competitiveness at the
highest levels of softball, and a 1994 Mankato tournament in which Junker¹s
defeated an array of powers to win the championship.

He says although that win helped the team¹s player-recruitment efforts, he
never was heavily involved in wooing athletes with money.

³We tried to keep our team local and family-oriented. We had plenty of
talent around here. About as far we went was Ellsworth (in the Worthington
area), and we had a catcher who lived in Minot (N.D.).²

Though men¹s fastpitch in the Mankato area pales beside what it once was,
Junker says he¹s buoyed when he sees his athletically precocious grandson
toe the rubber.

Kyle Looft plays on a 10-and-under team. He¹s 7.

Used with the permission from The Free Press, Mankato, Minnesota
(August 17, 2005).