The SCC used to be excellent for baseball, Centerville won a couple of titles, DC won one, Albia under Boyd was always good and Chariton generally had a decent team. Not sure why hit has fallen off so much the last 5 to 10 years but it has.
High School Sports Thread
- Thread starter qwerty
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I see Albia made it to sub state, with a 14-19 record. Plays Pleasantville. Pleasantville won it last year and they returned most of their players.
Yeah... I'm not sure why either... I know a lot of the MStM kids played a ton of USSSA baseball. I think that helps a ton compared to some of the schools farther away from metro that don't do a lot of travel tourneys.
It's probably just resources and proximity to travel ball teams, training and facilities. It's a relatively poor part of the state that isn't exactly within an easy drive of the types of facilities and programs that kids close to the metro have.
I don’t see a lot of socioeconomic and geographic differences compared to the Pleasantville and Lynville-sullys of the world.
Baseball isn’t a super fun sport to play or watch and it takes your summer away. Unless you have a culture of winning it gets hard to get boys to play.
I think there are a growing number of USSA teams filled with kids with neither the talent nor willingness to do what it takes to improve themselves to be competitive. I hear from parents that their kids are tired of playing on a team with other kids who could care less.
Davis County could have been very good last year, and more than decent this year, unfortunately I would guess 6-7 starters a year just quit around their freshman year. Half of the best players just don't want to play in the summer or don't want to play JV baseball like they might in basketball. Or have issues with the coach.
I had a travel team of all DC kids that won a state USSSA title, not world beaters but a very solid group that would of been Jr/Sr last year...I think 3 of them actually played HS baseball up through Varsity out of the 12 I had on the team, including easily the best 2-3 athletes in the school.
A local coach gets enamored with any kid that played AAU ball and is now as an 8th grader is on his HS team. He will sit juniors and seniors that are equal skill or better just to play the “new toy” 8th grader. He can’t figure out why so many kids quit at the Jr/Sr level. Kids at that age don’t want to sit for an 8th grader no better than them. He will also pull the older kids after an error and let the young kid keep playing. He’s confused because he doesn’t have enough to not play Varsity starters on JV.
The local HS FB coach does the opposite and has been very successful and has a good sized roster. His idea is kids playing 4 years have earned the right to play unless there is a Grand Canyon gap between the freshman and older kid (throwing out if the kids dad is an assistant)
Little late to this party but West is being coached this year by a kid who graduated there in 2021. He's the 3rd head coach there since he was a senior and if I remember right he got tossed at a game in Fort Dodge along with 3 other guys in the dugout. His senior season went so well the coach at the time said he was the only kid he's ever said couldn't come back and work out in the baseball facility in the offseason.
When they hired him I told one of the other dads that they couldn't have picked a worse candidate if they tried. I have been very surprised with how they've done this year. They're just a little bit over .400 for wins this year after winning 10 games my son's junior and senior years.
What is more distressing is he goes from getting tossed to four years later being hired as behavioral intervention specialist.
I was a a gathering of a mutual acquaintance last year he was at and while he wasn’t doing anything illegal if the cops would have shown up half of the buildings in the school district would have been looking for new administrators. I’m not going to crucify a kid for being a knucklehead when he was 18 but there have been a whole bunch of people who ought to know better who have shielded him from any and all consequences of those poor decisions.
Cop family and money goes a long, long way to keep things bottled up...
I think Pleasantville being like 30 mins from Des Moines makes travel ball and other training more feasible than say schools in the lower two tiers of counties. It makes a difference. But it’s probably just a lot more of if you have tradition you get way more kids out, like you say. But when trying to explain regional differences, I do think proximity to a major population center that has training and travel ball matters.
U Trip ball isn’t for everybody. It’s a super long season and the weekends can be brutal. But man it can be fun too if you’ve got the right families.
Raccoon River still has 4 teams left and 2 of the games tonight were conference games. Raccoon River has got to be the best baseball conference in 3a.
