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Growing up in the Country Creek subdivision, just east of the Ballwin Golf Course, she played catch with her dad, Jim Boen. Those games of catch eventually turned into a state championship at Parkway West High School in 1988, a full-ride scholarship to the University of Missouri and a chance to pitch in the College World Series in 1994.

Now all grown up and with kids of her own, Mirikitani is still in her parents’ backyard, playing catch. She’s done so for the past decade with young girls she teaches to pitch.

But this field of dreams might not have a happy ending. For many of those 10 years, Mirikitani and her parents have found themselves in a battle with the Country Creek Homeowners Association, whose trustees want to stop the pitching lessons.

When I first wrote about Mirikitani’s battle, in 2018, her son was 11 and playing catch with his grandfather in the backyard while Mirikitani taught girls to pitch. He’s now a junior in high school, and after a brief respite during the COVID-19 pandemic, the trustees are back with a vengeance.

“The new HOA president told me he took the job to get rid of me,” Mirikitani told me last week, before a lesson with two girls was about to begin. “He told me they are going to take my father’s home, his Social Security income and my wages.”

That president, David Hall, lives down the street from the Boens, who have added Mirikitani to the deed of their house so that she is an owner. Hall could not be reached for comment.

But the plan of the trustees is clear. They’ve written a proposal to go before the homeowners’ association for a vote. It would allow the three trustees to declare a home a “nuisance” and issue an undetermined amount of fines that could be collected by placing a lien on the home. The wording is so broad that nearly anything could be declared a nuisance by the trustees.

“No nuisance shall be permitted to exist or operate upon any lot so as to be offensive or detrimental to any other lot or its occupants,” the proposed new section of the HOA indentures reads. “The Trustees have the power to determine if any device, noise, odor or activity constitutes a nuisance, and has the power to adopt additional rules to restrict and prohibit nuisances.”

And if a homeowner doesn’t vote in the election? Their vote counts as a yes for whatever the trustees want, according to another of the proposed new indentures.

Mirikitani hopes that the neighbors she grew up with stop this power play. The backyard where she teaches pitching is surrounded on one side by trees that line Grand Glaize Creek. The closest homeowner — the only one whose backyard opens up to the pitching net Boen erected — approves of the activity. So do other neighbors who sometimes come to watch the pitching lessons.

But the trustees are determined to shut Mirikitani down, and she’s just as determined to keep doing what she loves.

“All I want to do is help people,” she says. “It just flabbergasts me that people are intent on crushing that. I just don’t understand it. It’s just girls playing catch. What’s so offensive?”

Last spring, the girls whom she teaches baked cookies and walked the neighborhood, trying to meet people and explain their side of the dispute.

At 81 years old, Judy Boen enjoys the smiles her daughter brings to the girls’ faces. And she enjoys seeing dads come to help, playing catch with their daughters, just like her husband did with Christe when she was little.

The Boens, big Cardinals fans who used to organize bus trips to watch Albert Pujols play with the Los Angeles Angels after he left ӣ����Ƶ, love the sound of a ball hitting a glove on a spring or summer day in the backyard — like it’s always been, long before anybody complained about it.

“I didn’t ask for this fight,” Mirikitani says.

But she stays in it, in part to teach the girls about life.

“Pitching is so analogous to life,” she says. “I hope these girls see me fighting this fight and it encourages them because some day, they’re going to face battles, too.”