Quote:
Originally Posted by bob jenkins
Iowa plays in the summer instead of the spring to help with this problem (although I'm certain it creates some others).
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I grew up in Iowa, so I can speak to this a little bit.
Pluses of high school summer baseball:
1) it allows athletes to participate in 4 school sports if they choose, which is a major plus for the smallest schools. At my high school it was: football or cross country, basketball or wrestling, track or golf, and baseball. On the girls side it was volleyball or cross country, basketball, track or golf, and softball. There would be a tiny bit of overlap between seasons, but usually only a week or two unless a particular team made a deep playoff run, which few of the teams at my high school ever managed to accomplish.
2) The weather is a lot better on both the temperature and precipitation fronts. Yeah, we'd get some evening thunderstorms, but in most cases our fields would be good-to-go by the next evening.
3) Longer daylight hours mean you can start a doubleheader at 4 or 5 pm and finish before sundown, even on a field without lights.
Minuses of high school summer baseball:
1) It interferes with summer jobs and family vacations.
2) It's incompatible with travel ball/legion ball. Neither of those were a thing for high school aged kids in Iowa when I was growing up, where in MN it's quite popular.
3) You end up in a situation where a student has already graduated, but is still on the baseball team. This happens with spring baseball too, but only for a couple of weeks rather than for the bulk of the season.
4) You end up with some graduated students deciding not to play baseball in their senior season for any number of reasons. In my case, I knew I was going to be playing football in college, so I skipped my senior baseball season to spend more time running and lifting weights. Of course, I wasn't that good at baseball anyway, so it was a pretty easy decision to make.