Jim Chakulski

#8 - OF (profile)

The founder and captain of Team inDRStructible, Jim played his first softball during the summers of his college years, manning the outfield for the Golf Club of Avon in the Hartford Country Club League. (In 1988, Avon finished its eight-game season with no victories. The following year, the team folded and all company softball was limited to the annual summer picnic.)

Jim did not experience a victory on the softball field until playing for Smith Barney in the Hartford Stockbroker’s League. Jim took a semester off from college to intern for the firm, and went on to play twelve seasons and win three league titles with them, until the arrival of son George triggered his departure from the team. Much of Team inDRStructible’s traditions – post-game wrap-ups, team dinners, and end-of-season picnics to name a few – can be traced back to Jim’s experiences with Smith Barney.

Following graduation and subsequent hiring by DRS, Jim joined the Market Street Maulers, led at the time by Stuart Katten. The Maulers would finish a dismal 1-10 in 1993 (the lone win coming during a week in which Jim was away on vacation.) To maintain a level of fairness, Stuart always put himself at the bottom of the line-up, a practice Jim later adopted and employed when filling out the line-up card for Team inDRStructible. The following year the Maulers were skippered by Carol Andrews, and fared no better, stumbling to the finish line with a 1-9 record.

But in 1995, the Maulers improved to 7-7 and were invited to participate in the annual Cove Cup Invitational for the first time. Despite the team’s progress, the squad could have been even better had it had a reliable roster that could field a full team of ten players each week. The frustration of playing shorthanded and losing so many close games ultimately led Jim to breaking from the Maulers in the off-season and forming Team inDRStructible.

As he has with all other previous teams, “Junior” has took to patrolling the outfield with Team inDRStructible, and has played more games there than any other taxman.

With the stick, Jim once led the team in homeruns and twice was the team’s RBI leader, though those seasons came long ago before Mike Malone joined the team and only because Dave Cushman has never been able to play full-time. More recently, during 2006, he was the team’s batting leader, an obvious sign that a few of the team’s sluggers had off years. Jim has had three game-winning walk-off hits and four grand slams, but ranks a 3-homerun, 7-RBI effort as his best game since it came against the taxmen’s arch nemesis Fighting Plankton from Hell.