Metro Atlanta nonprofit plays softball for 52 hours straight for good cause

CARTERSVILLE, Ga. - One hundred and fifteen hours is the current Guinness Book of World Record for the longest softball game ever played. Recently, a group of men from a metro Atlanta nonprofit gathered together to beat it. They came up a little short but raised a lot of money for a good cause in the process.

Four days, 19 hours and three minutes. That's the record this team of 27 men set out to beat with a nonstop game of softball at Dillinger Park in Cartersville.

"Well, I played sports my whole life, and I was trying to think of something unique. Something that maybe others wouldn't do or hadn't done that could create some energy and buzz in the community. And the longest softball game seemed like something I would enjoy and like other guys would buy into as well," Bruce Deel said. He's the founder and CEO of City of Refuge and MOST, Men Opposing Sex Trafficking. A group within the organization set out to beat the record and raise money.

"City of Refuge has been around for 27 years to bring light, hope, and transformation to those in metro Atlanta who might be experiencing some level of crisis in their life. Out of that, we started the survivor program for women and children who are coming out of sexual trafficking exploitation. Then out of that, we launched a program called MOST, men opposing sex trafficking," Deel explained. "So one of the reasons we really wanted to attack this is our hometown here in Atlanta, unfortunately, has one of the highest rates of sex trafficking per capita in the United States."

The attempt to break the record

At the start of the game, spirits were high. The fans in the stands and the players on the field felt confident, but it was not all fun and games.

"It was a much more arduous task than we thought it was going to be frankly. You could only sleep for a limited amount of time because the amount of players, and bathroom breaks could only be five minutes at a time. So you have to sleep right by the dugout, so you're in the elements the entire time, whether that's heat or cold or whatever the case may be," he said.

The players tried to stay motivated by focusing on the cause, but they faced some big challenges even in the early hours of the game.

"We had one guy take a fly ball off the face, and we had a couple of other guys face injuries as well. So, frankly, we didn't have quite enough players on either team to survive some of the attrition that took place," Deel said.

Ultimately, they had to call off the effort after 51 hours, a little more than two days in.

"I think we played about 275 innings, and the score was 765 to 750 or something like that. So 1,500 runs scored over 275 innings and 51 hours," he told Good Day's Lindsay Tuman.

Game raised money for a good cause

While the game didn't go quite as long as they hoped, it was by no means a failure.

"We raised with the committments coming in, half a million dollars, which is a lot of money. We had a ton of exposure, we had people all over the country looking at our website, our live feed, social media posts. People are asking questions now about trafficking and how they can get involved. So at the end of the day a tremendous success," Deel said.

If anything, they consider this a practice run.

'Yeah, you learn a lot when you do something the first time. We learned a bunch of lessons, so we're scheduled again through Sept. 17th through the 22nd. We're going to crank it up, do it all over again, and we're going to be successful this time," Deel said.

Next time, the group plans to go in with the maximum number of players - 20 on each team. That way, they can have more time to sleep and rest and give themselves more leeway in case of injuries. They also aim to raise $1 million for the next game.

If you want to learn more about their efforts, you can visit their website here.