iowacapitaldispatch.com
More like a former D3 player and high school coach looking for a way for his players to keep playing ball.
Also on the 1957 CWS team was the Roland Rocket, Gary Thompson, who was an All American in both basketball and baseball.
Going from first base to outfield to being an at least decent MLB defensive catcher is quite the career arc.
Baseball is an expensive money suck for any university outside of a handful of schools in the southeast. I love baseball, could sit and watch a lot of it but getting rid of it was the right decision unless you want to dump millions into supporting it. Cap Timm needed a bunch of renovations to be on par with a high school field.
And the deck is stacked against any team in the upper midwest without access to an indoor BB stadium. So much of the season is played in "winter" in this part of the world. Baseball season starts 14 FEB. The Big 12 Tourney starts 21 MAY so by they time it is getting nice in Iowa the season is pretty much over.
You don't have to got that far, but you have to have good indoor practice facilities, which honestly a lot of Iowa high schools and private club teams now have, where few did when ISU still had baseball. That still means totally front loaded, and probably overall heavily loaded road games, but nowadays there's so much more development that happens in indoor facilities, even in the south, that the weather disadvantage isn't so big.
Baseball has definitely seen a resurgence in Iowa, at least in Central Iowa. Anecdotally what seems to really drag overall participation numbers down vs football is attrition. A lot of the large schools have a huge number of 8th graders and Fr out for baseball, but those classes thin out a lot by the time they are Srs.
Makes the gap between football and baseball even wider when you consider baseball has 5 grades and football 4 that can participate.
That's because you just can't play unless you are 200% committed to the sport and nothing else. You can't just "be on the team" and play some JV and maybe get in for some scrub time. Lots of times kids get told "if you aren't on the year round travel team, then you're not serious and you won't play". Or similar. So kids just give it up.
As a former baseball parent there's a lot of issues with high school baseball in Iowa. From what I've seen (and talking with parents at other schools) for some reason it's become super political on who plays and who doesn't. Part of that I think is because you need a kid who's all in and playing basically year round to sort of be good, especially with the big schools. The kids that do that have parents that can swing a checkbook. The other big thing I've seen is it's such a time suck in the summer where a kid could be hanging out at the pool or working a summer job, baseball makes it so you can't actually do that because of when it is. We had a pretty big senior class this year, started with 6 and finished with 5. My kid made it 3 weeks and decided that if they were only going to let up pitch despite only 2 kids being able to hit over .250 he wasn't going to waste his last summer at home to play 5 innings a week at most. Lots of kids have to make that decision eventually and no matter how much money mom and dad spent on super duper elite travel teams only 9 play at once.
My kid made kind of the same decision. He will be a senior and chose not to go out this summer. Last year the coach made it clear that if you played AAU, you played no matter what. 3 8th graders that played AAU were coming up and the coach made it known that they would play.
