The American Legion District 13 baseball tournament began Wednesday after deadline at Yanks Field in Ste. Genevieve.
The hosts from Post 150 earned the No. 1 seed in the double-elimination tournament by virtue of winning all seven games against the other three teams in the district. Festus Post 253 is the No. 2 seed and played Rock Memorial Post 283 (No. 3) in the first round Wednesday. Ste. Gen played Mineral Area (No. 4) in the other first-round game.
The winner’s semifinals are tonight (July 9) at 5:30 pm. The loser’s bracket game follows at 7:30 p.m. Festus beat De Soto SMCI to win the District 13 tournament before winning the Zone tournament and advancing to state last year. De Soto didn’t field a AAA team this summer. Mineral Area hadn’t fielded a AAA team in this decade. There were four AAA American Legion teams in Jefferson County two years ago, but the Hillsboro Prospects disbanded and it’s unclear whether SMCI will return.
This isn’t the part where I tell you that what we’ve been used to when it comes to summer baseball is over. The Jefferson County Blazers will likely finish as the top 18U team in the St. Louis Amateur Baseball Association (SLABA). Most of their players are from the county, although their players from Lutheran South are among their best.
The usual suspects like travel and club baseball continue to drain talent away from two summer baseball institutions caught up in a fundamental change of how kids live today. Just a generation ago, teenagers weren’t distracted by social media and the internet was more of a fascination than a dependency. And I’m not just saying that about young people. We’re all tied to technology from the time we wake up. And every keystroke has to go somewhere. I can assure you that data centers aren’t being built to provide a water source for the super wealthy’s underground bunkers. Gotta love TikTok.
Let me give you an example. I swore I’d never use my phone for online banking. I swore I’d never pay my bills online. Now that I pay every bill and constantly monitor our banking online, I can’t imagine not having that capability. I’m just one person who changed the way I communicate, and that’s all being filed away somewhere.
My dad’s been gone since 2018. We were two generations apart because he was almost 40 when I was born. His formative years were spent during the Great Depression and World War II. He put the old in old school. I tried to think of something from my childhood that he thought was nonsense and would never pay for, and I can distinctly remember him laughing at the thought of paying for cable TV.
Times change, and the race to keep up with the technology that runs our lives gets faster than Jah’Meshia Patterson on the straightaway. It’s been a few years since I’ve kept score or copied the teams’ scorebook from paper. I pay Gamechanger to keep my book now. I’d love to see Gamechanger expand and add football, preferably by the end of August.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The Blazers will be in the playoffs next week, and the top two teams from District 13 advance to zone.
I’ll admit that this summer more than the rest I’m itching to start the new school year.
De Soto and Fox for the first time in years didn’t replace any head coaches from the last school year. Russ Schmidt has been the activities director at De Soto for three years. He’s also the head football coach. If any program needed stability a few years ago it was the Dragons. It appears they’ve found it under Schmidt’s leadership.