Senior pool sharks jump into the deep end

Ellen Loller crouches over the pool table, eyes concentrating on her intended shot. She wears a black glove — one specifically for playing pool, covering her thumb, pointer and middle fingers. It allows the cue to slide through her hand with ease. She hits the white ball and it cracks through the others, her target spinning into its pocket, right where it belongs. Her friends cheer.

No, they’re not at a bar, smoke doesn’t swirl around them and there are no beers in hand. They’re at the retirement community Village on the Green in Longwood, where eight women in their 80s and 90s play pool twice a week.

Now they do whatever they want, but for these women, playing pool in their younger days just wasn’t an option. Jenny Cox, 84, recalls, in her soft southern belle-accent, a time when her brother-in-law brought her and her older sister to a pool hall she was just 14.

“When he had told my mother what he had done she really let him know that that wasn’t the thing to do, ladies didn’t go in the pool hall,” Cox said.

She wasn’t so sure about it at the time, anyway.

“It was full of men,” she said as she scrunched her nose up. “It was really kind of a strange feeling, you know, you walk in and you’re the only female in there.”

Loller, 90, had much the same experience when she was young.

“I never thought about it before I got here; it wasn’t something that my mother and father would let me go to with the smoke and gambling and all this stuff,” Loller said.

The group has been playing for about nine years, and it’s not the only non-traditional senior activity at Village on the Green. Residents do cooking demos, Zumba, yoga and dance “Gangnam Style.”

Seniors are rebelling against the norm now, not content to sit around. It’s not just about bridge or bingo anymore. They’d rather play the games their mother wouldn’t approve of and explore technology and interests they didn’t have time for when they were focused on career and family.

To learn more about each of the communities mentioned, visit villageonthegreenrc.com, themayflower.com and holidaytouch.com.

At the Mayflower retirement community in Winter Park, residents spiritedly discuss global issues, play Wii sports and have gone on safari and to Europe together. At the Renaissance Retirement Center in Sanford, seniors do adventure travel, explore new creative outlets in photography and painting or play beanbag baseball.

“It’s important to always continue to learn and to have new adventures,” said Janelle Renda, community services director for the Mayflower.

“The more that you are staying mentally engaged I just think it makes a difference with warding off memory impairment,” said Ansley Holt, executive director for Village on the Green. “I just look at the people that still are active and participating in committees or volunteering, typically are in better health both mentally and physically; they just have a reason to get up in the morning.”

They’re finding new parts of themselves, and that’s what their golden years are all about, the women said.

Ruth Stewart, 93, is one of the pool group’s longest-term members, and loves the feeling of sinking in a ball. They all do. Playing the game makes them feel young.

“In almost every movie there’s a pool game, you always see pool being played and you can’t help wish that you could try it,” Stewart said. “It has a sort of a, I don’t know, a sort of graceful move to it.”