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Prep Baseball: Iowa’s boys of summer

28 July 2010 51 Comments

They play high school baseball in the summer in Iowa.

High school softball, too.

To someone raised in the Northeast and rooted in the South for most of his life, that’s as foreign as ice fishing. In every other state, all high school sports are finished by the end of May or mid June. The various prep athletes spend the summer hanging out with their friends and taking family vacations. Some even participate in sports camps or short summer leagues.

Long after the Summer Solstice, Iowa’s baseball and softball players are taking BP or throwing on the side. It’s been this way for baseball since 1946 when the first summer high school tournament was held because schools were losing  those players to other sports. About the same time, American Legion ball was going through a down cycle and had shifted its season to August and September.

“The schools asked for it,” said Bud Legg, information director for the Iowa High School Athletic  Association. “It’s uniquely Iowa.”

According to Legg, it’s also been extremely successful in the number of student-athletes and attendance. While the week-long summer state baseball tournament has drawn as many as 33,607 fans, Iowa actually had three such tournaments from 1946-1972, one in the spring, one in the summer and one in the fall. The latter was for the small schools that did not have football.

All those small schools remain a factor.  According to 2009-2010 enrollment figures, half of the state’s schools have less than 240 students; playing baseball and softball in the summer has helped the track, tennis and golf programs in the spring at those schools.

“They have to share a lot of the athletes,” Legg said.

Nonetheless, isn’t summer supposed to be all about swimming, fishing and video games?

Perhaps. Just don’t bother telling the players competing in this week’s state baseball tournament that they are missing out on all that fun. Well, at least the players from Iowa City West and Dubuque Hempstead, who advanced to Friday’s Class 4A semifinals with victories Wednesday at breezy Principal Park.

“We’re practicing 10 hours a day and this makes it worth your time,” said IC West winning pitcher Ryan Rumpf after the Trojans defeated Sioux City North 11-1 in six innings.

IC West Coach Charlie Stumpff said his team practices 6-8 hours a day (it probably seems longer  to the players). He also said it’s easier playing high school baseball in the summer – when there are no classes, tests or homework to worry about.

“These are the best of times for us,” Stumpff said. “We would play year-round.”

There’s the other angle to Iowa’s boys of summer. Where players in Sun Belt states play outdoors year-round, the winters force players in northern climates indoors to the batting cages. Common sense would dictate that the quality of the sport would take an E-6, but Wednesday’s games had solid pitching, clutch hitting and great plays in the field.

Rumpf, a junior right-hander, gave up three hits, struck out six and walked one in advancing his season record to 11-0. He helped his cause by driving in three runs with a double and sacrifice fly. Hempstead’s winning pitcher, senior Andrew Redman, tossed a two-hitter with six strikeouts in upping his record to 10-0. He added two RBI while going 1-for-3.

Of course, there were some plays Wednesday that even had the youngsters cavorting in the splash pad behind right field wondering what was going on. There were wild pitches, a balk and a couple of mental errors that would embarrass a Little Leaguer.

There was the unusual sight of a team playing its infield in for a play at the plate despite trailing by seven runs in the sixth inning. And, the other team pulling hit-and-runs and stealing bases despite that seven-run advantage . Blame the 10-run mercy rule, although you have to wonder why that would not be waived during the state tournament.

Still, whether you’re talking high school championship baseball in the late spring or mid-summer, some things remain the same. You prepare, you give it your best shot and you put it all in perspective.

“The key,” Stumpff said, “is not to make it more important than what it is.”

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