A diamond on the diamond
As she came up to bat Wednesday night, Laura Owens was handed a softball inscribed with the words, "Laura, will you marry me?" Seconds later, her boyfriend Jake Sullenger walked onto the field carrying a rose and a ring. He then dropped to one knee and asked her to marry him.
Boyfriend scores big with home-plate proposal
A Kalispell man's romantic marriage proposal on Field 1 of the Conrad Complex on Wednesday night gave new meaning to the phrase "field of dreams."
In softball terms, Jake Sullenger didn't strike out. He hit it out of the park.
Sullenger's girlfriend, Laura Owens, had no idea what was about to transpire during the women's league game. She was the third batter for the Rocky Mountain Aircraft/Bliss Salon team, and stepped up to home plate to get the surprise of a lifetime.
Her boyfriend had arranged to have the umpire hand her a softball inscribed with the words, "Laura, will you marry me?"
Umpire Dave White was in on the plan. Owens' teammates knew, as did most of the 100 to 150 people in the bleachers.
"Once she got the ball, I came walking out of her dugout with a single rose and a ring," he said. "I got down on one knee and asked her to marry me."
She said yes.
"Her eyes welled up, then I welled up," Sullenger recounted. "She was so flabbergasted, we stayed up until 3 a.m. talking about everything."
Owens had to focus on the game afterward, but was preoccupied with her new diamond ring, which she simply described as "big - and nice."
Her team won the game, but she doesn't remember if she scored any runs.
"I wasn't paying much attention after that," she said. "I was kind of in shock."
Owens, who plays third base, has been an avid softball player since the late 1990s on the women's and co-ed leagues. It was Sullenger's dad who put the bug in his ear to propose at home plate.
"It was a total shocker for her," he said. "I'd been setting her up, telling her I wasn't going to be ready for marriage for another year or two."
The couple met a year ago through mutual friends. They both love to dance, so after a couple of months of going out dancing, they began dating. Owens is a waitress at Genki Restaurant; Sullenger is a ranch hand at Affinity Foundation, a Christian home for troubled teens in Proctor.
A wedding date hasn't been set yet.
"This was totally not my style," Sullenger said of his brave and very public proposal. "I'm a shy, in-the-corner kind of person."
His friends chided him afterward for setting the marriage-proposal bar pretty high.
Owens agreed it's a tough act to follow.
"He did pretty good," she said.
Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by e-mail at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com