They say one good deed deserves another.

Anybody who knows Betty Howes from Southampton will tell you she has given her life to helping others through the Sunshine League, Bermuda’s oldest charity. She was their tenth president and also served as the tagging coordinator.

Recently she had a good deed returned when a group of players from Southampton Rangers cricket team — without even knowing who she was — spent a Saturday morning cleaning up her property as part of their Community Outreach Programme. They spent a few hours at her house cutting her grass and trimming hedges and trees.

“She really appreciated it when they came and did it out of the blue,” said Mrs Howes’s son, Leroy DeRosa-Howes. “My mother was president of the Sunshine League for several years and spent a lot of time doing charity work for them, helping raise funds during tag days.”

The idea to do something for Mrs Howes came about after the Southampton Rangers coach Randy Brangman decided the team should do something for the elderly lady living there.

“That’s the area that I run afternoons and I always ran across her place and saw her there one day,” said Brangman. “It had been on my mind for a while so I went to the players and said ‘I go past this house when I go running and maybe we could cut their grass’. Come to find out she is [club member] Randy Raynor’s godma. When I spoke to the players they agreed one time, they said they thought that would be a nice community thing to do.

“I contacted Randy, we talked about and he talked to his grandma and we went up and did it on a Saturday. We had about 11 people on that Saturday, we cut the grass, trimmed the trees and took it all away. She had tears in her eyes, but it made us feel so good that we could do something for somebody. It was very refreshing to be able to put a smile on somebody’s face.”

Mrs Howes, now 88 and faced with health issues, had been tagging for the Sunshine League for more than 75 years. The Royal Gazette highlighted her efforts as part of its ‘Dare to Care’ campaign in 2010 which featured people doing positive things in the community.

The Rangers cricket team plans to do more work in their parish in the coming months, but this month will be a busy one for the team as they are defending their Western Counties title today with a second-round match against Willow Cuts.

“I don’t know how often but we want to do something else in the community, for people in Southampton, to let them know that it is not only about cricket,” said Brangman.

“If we can help somebody else then we will. When we have Saturdays off again we’ll look to see if somebody else needs a hand. We do want people to know that we care about people, especially the elderly. By going up there and cutting her grass and seeing the smile on her face and have her tell us how much she appreciated it, it was really a good feeling.”