2026 charity mushball tournament a massive success under One Net Yelm’s guidance

One of the newest Prairie Days traditions in Yelm has quickly become one of the most popular over the last half-decade, and on Sunday, June 28, the annual charity mushball tournament concluded the celebratory weekend on a high note.

According to Angela Longnecker, with One Net Yelm, this year’s mushball tournament included a pool of local charities for the competing teams to choose to represent. This year, the winning team, Saved By The Ball, selected Bounty For Families as its local charity to represent. After defeating Good Vibes Line Drives in the championship game, Saved By The Ball was able to donate $1,000 to the Yelm-based Bounty for Families non-profit.

“The whole reason I even signed up for this tournament is because I saw it was for charity and the winner gets a lot of money donated to a charity of their choice,” Eric Trent, coach of Saved By The Ball, told the Nisqually Valley News after his team’s championship win. “It just seemed like a good cause, and this is my favorite hobby. It all worked out today.”

Trent added that typically the members of team Saved By The Ball are opponents of each other in a competitive softball league. For the charity mushball tournament, the usual competitors felt it was a good cause to come together in an effort to raise money for a local charity.

“It worked out today. We all got along really well. We had a really good team who went undefeated in play. It was a pretty good day today,” Trent said. “I would encourage teams to sign up for this next year’s tournament because the more people who sign up for these tournaments, the more money can be donated to non-profits.”

Longnecker noted that seven teams in total participated in the 2026 Yelm charity mushball tournament. Additionally, several local businesses and non-profits set up booths at the Longmire Park playground for attendees to learn about their products, enter raffles and more.

“We are so thankful for all of the business’s support for the mushball tournament,” Longnecker said. “We got a lot of local support from local businesses. We also invited the businesses and the non-profits to come set up a booth if they wanted to.”

Additionally, 2026 marked the first year that One Net Yelm has led the annual charity mushball tournament — as typically the City of Yelm will host the event.

“We’re so excited to host the tournament,” Longnecker said. “The City of Yelm used to run this event but they were no longer able to do it. Naturally, we took it over and it’s a great fit for us at One Net Yelm. We have some City of Yelm people on our board.
We’re out raising money for local charities within the community,” Longnecker said. “All of our team sponsorships are donated to whatever charity they chose. We are excited to find out which charity. We have also invited local charities to come and promote their local organization so the community can learn more about them.”

She added that One Net Yelm will return in 2027 to host the annual charity mushball tournament, and noted she’ll be doing a lot of recruiting in the next year to pack the tournament with as many teams as possible.

“The more registrations we get, the more we can give away,” Longnecker said. “It will be our goal next year to get as many teams as we can. One Net Yelm is grateful to be part of the Yelm and surrounding area communities.”