Picture that you are a coach for Texas A&M and your star outfielder Jace LaViolette is eligible for the draft this year and you won’t have his bat in the lineup next year. So you need a couple young guys to come in and fill his shoes. Your team fights through the post season and either makes it to Omaha or not; but then one way or another, your season ends. Jace and the rest of your upperclassmen are now gone. What do you do? Mount Vernon happens to be having a doubleheader against their rivals so you could watch this matchup. Or in Arizona, at the same time, the junior olympics are occurring where the best kids across the country are competing in the biggest annual baseball tournament. It’s a no brainer, the scouts are going to watch these players that have already proven themselves in their season rather than watch two 3A schools in the middle of Iowa in a midseason game.
Missing out on scouting by colleges is an issue for many Iowan baseball players. Summer ball is the most important time for recognition and it is harder for an Iowan to be seen by these bigger schools outside of Iowa and the big 10 because Iowa is the only state where baseball isn’t in the spring.
How can we mend this gap? First let’s look at how our neighbors do it. I’ve spent a lot of time in Missouri over the last month and got to meet kids from the greater Kansas City area at the Urban Youth Academy and the way they run their season is by holding their tryouts in late February. They are able to miss the bulk amount of snow that usually hits in January and early February. With the advancements of turf fields as well they are able to play in worse weather because they don’t have to tarp the field or drag them. Out of the ten kids that were in my group at the UYA seven of their schools had turf fields. As the sport of baseball grows and changes we need to too to give our athletes a chance to compete with other states.
Opportunities are limited for Iowa high school baseball players because all of the huge scouting events are mainly in the summer — right in the middle of our season. While I was at the Urban Youth Academy of Kansas City, they asked me to come to try out for their national team where they play in a tournament against the other Urban Youth Academies across the country. Every year during the all star weekend they hold this tournament wherever the all star game is being held for the MLB, this year it is in Atlanta, Georgia. But there is one huge problem for me. This whole event takes place close to the end of our season so I can’t go because I’m from Iowa. This is the consequence for Iowa being the only state with our high school season in the summer.
The season in the summer also makes it so where eighth graders are forced into high school ball early. This on surface level doesn’t sound like a bad thing but it forces kids that are not ready to be go against freshman and sophomores in l2 and l3 games instead of them being able to progress with other kids of similar age and stature to compete instead of being forced into something they are not quite ready for yet. All of these issues can be solved by starting our season in March instead of June.
