Author: Ben Kopnick

The familiar sounds of the ballfield were in the air on a late August morning. Ping! The metal bat meets the ball. Smack! The ball hits the back of the leather glove. “One out,” one of the players says. The rhythms of the game were instantly recognizable to the players on the field. After all, most of them have been playing some form of it for decades. The two teams on the field were the Yankees and the Red Sox. But this wasn’t Yankee Stadium — this was Eden Prairie’s Miller Park, playing host to West Metro Senior Softball (WMSS).…

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It’s no secret that children are influenced by their environment, learning from the people, places, and things around them. For Eden Prairie resident Amalia Moreno-Damgaard, that meant absorbing the lessons taught by family and food in her native Guatemala. “I call my grandmother on my mother’s side my north star,” said Moreno-Damgaard. After her parents’ divorce, she lived with her grandmother in a small town in southeastern Guatemala from age 5 to 9. There, Moreno-Damgaard watched (and sometimes helped) her grandmother run her variety store that sold everything from salt and beans to pyrotechnics for celebrations and gear for horses.…

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