Every June, a group of Keylane colleagues temporarily stop being software engineers, consultants and testers. For one Friday evening, they’re softball players. More or less. For or the ninth year in a row, senior consultant Ellen van der Moezel organised Keylane’s place in the annual company softball tournament. This June, she swapped her laptop for the dugout, splitting her time between making plays on the field and cheering on her teammates from behind the fence at HSV Zwijndrecht.
•
The tournament itself is an annual fixture on the Dutch corporate softball calendar: twelve teams, forty minutes per match, and the friendlier bedrijfssoftbal format — which is a polite way of saying most of us are not, technically, softball players. Our eleven — engineers, testers, consultants and a few others — finished fifth of twelve. Somewhere between “a few” and “enough” matches were played. Nobody was keeping close count.
The most-discussed moment of the evening involved a player whose name will not appear in this article. On his first swing, the ball disappeared into the bushes. On his second, another ball followed. On the third attempt, the bat decided to join them. Nobody was hit on the way. As far as we know, the bushes are still holding on to it.
– Nikita Siem-A-Joe, Project Lead
Almost everyone wore the black Keylane team shirt. One person, for reasons never fully explained, wore a white one. The barbecue was busy, the music was summery, and conversations wandered from holidays to questionable batting technique. Work barely got a mention.
- Remi Quispel, Consultatent
This is roughly what an ordinary evening of life at Keylane looks like when you take the laptops away: mixed roles, mixed abilities, a lot of laughing, and somebody’s baseball cap turning up in a photo two people later.
The after-party was short. A storm was rolling in, and most people wanted to be home before it arrived — which, more or less, they did. On time, and roughly dry.
Fifth of twelve. Ninth year running. Same tournament in June. If you’d like to see what else the Keylane Playground gets up to, there’s more where this came from — and if any of this sounds like your kind of Friday evening, our open vacancies are a reasonable next step.
