Coughlin is the president of the Capital Alumni Network, an umbrella organization that has about 220 alumni college chapters and 6,000 registered college graduates who have moved to the Washington area. Its 15th annual CAN softball tournament takes place this weekend at the NASA Goddard Softball Field Complex in Greenbelt, and attendees are encouraged to bring school supplies to donate to D.C. Public Schools. Tournament organizers are soliciting sponsors for the event to benefit the CAN Scholarship Fund. How many active members does CAN have? There’s over 1 million college alumni living in the D.C. area who have gone to at least one event through CAN or who stay connected. The number 6,000 is deceiving because for every one registered person, there are at least five or six who aren’t. It’s a pretty good demographic. We’ve got 72 softball teams of 45 people in our softball sports week tournament in two weeks.
Sports week? We do sports weeks — softball, flag football, basketball, volleyball, soccer — and we do them well. We started about 15 years ago with five teams for softball and it spiraled. Now 2,000 people will come out for the tournament.
Becoming a member … Is free. It just takes a visit to dcalum.org to find their chapter and alumni events.
What else do you do? A lot of things we do are philanthropic. Last year we collected about 1,000 items for DCPS. We partner up with places like the Kennedy Center and have networking or happy hour events, toy drives, food drives or scholarship sponsorships.
Describe a personal experience. I became a member in 2006 and met a ton of people from other chapters. My most memorable experiences are weekends with good friends and food and sometimes softball [laughs]. It’s really a sight: softball teams interacting, free food, free beer, people playing games everywhere. You’ve got teams who lose but stick around until the end. – Natalie Plumb
– Natalie Plumb
