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Reply to "Andrews Study Pointing in Favor of College's "New Baseball Model""

@PitchingFan posted:

If you have most of your guys who are not playing anything after school ball then the playoffs are probably not a concern.  That is hard to believe in today's world.  Every player on our varsity here in SC plays summer ball on different levels and we are 2A.  All you normally get in a regular spring to get ready for ball is 1 week before scrimmages and 3/4 weeks before games so nothing is different.  The season would only go from September 1 until the end of October so weather would not be a problem here except it would start warm and end cooler rather than the opposite in the spring.

The biggest hurdle is the big dog coaches are not in support of this.  They are the ones whining because  they say their pitchers have been throwing all summer which is not true because no one here started playing until mid June.  Their biggest complaint is their best players will have to choose between playing school ball and the showcases in the fall and they know that their best players will choose showcase on the weekends over school ball during the week.  They are not proposing limiting games by 40%.  You can get up to 26 games in regular season and they are proposing 20 games but allowing Saturday DH's to only count as 1 which is like softball so you could get 23/24 according to what they decide. 

I have not heard anything in their proposal of a Spring 2 season other than they are proposing the ability to play games in the spring of next year just like they do in the fall with a limit of 80% of returning varsity players.  The schools that do this now use a combination of school coaches and parents/outside people.  So if your school does not do it now why would they do it in 2021.  If they have been doing it, then they will do it the same way.  I don't see that changing anything. 

The coaches that understand this will get their players ready starting in a few weeks with someone outside their coaching staff running outside practices VOLUNTARILY.  The biggest downfall to this happening is that you have to be in school to practice or play.  Our school system's plan is to start online and move to face to face or have alternating days where kids go to school.  We could not practice until the first day the kids went into the classroom.  If a kid chose online school as an option then they would not be eligible for sports is the interpretation I am hearing from school officials.  Which does not make sense since homeschool kids can play sports in SC. 

I guess it is all a moot point now that the high school league voted down the proposal today opting instead to just push back the start of football season for the moment, but the proposal that I saw floating around called for only 16 varsity games and 10 subvarsity games (as opposed to the usual 26 and I think 22 (not really an issue for us as our schedule this year had less than 26 total games scheduled for Varsity and JV.  

With 4 region qualifiers from each region  as it usually is with what was our region makeup it was pretty hard to not make the playoffs, granted I'm not sure the last time we actually won a playoff game was.  Two of the schools in our region struggle heavily in all sports outside of basketball (I'm not even sure if they have a JV team in baseball at the very least we weren't scheduled to play them) and this year we only had 5 schools in the region to begin with.

We are in a low income area (Title 1 school) where most people with the means or motivation find a way to get their kids (athletes in particular) into other schools whether it be the nearby AAAAA high school that typically has success in most sports or a private school.  Between the financial and time aspects of it and kids leaving the school/area that is why we have so many kids that don't play travel ball in our program, in fact we had a couple of kids this year that I honestly wonder if they had ever played any baseball (they were great kids but there is a long long way to go on the field).  

We definitely have an uphill climb to improve our program, everything from facilities and resources to simple organization seems to be an issue across the board in all of our athletic programs at the high school and youth sports.  I am hoping that the local rec department is able to continue with fall ball this fall (which has only existed for  4 or 5 years I believe) and maybe get involved with that and hopefully next summer figure out a way to give our high school guys an opportunity to keep playing and get some more experience.

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