Traxler: Spring baseball decision will be a careful, delicate question for South Dakota

The movement has begun to bring high school baseball under the South Dakota High School Activities Association’s wing, or to at least look into it.

The SDHSAA will study it for the next year and see if it’s worth sanctioning the sport or to leave it under the independent South Dakota High School Baseball Association, which has ran the spring version of the sport for the past 20 years.

The big headline from the SDHSAA’s meeting on April 17 was that American Legion officials in South Dakota believe sanctioning high school baseball will bring an eventual end to summer Legion baseball in the state.

Now, that is likely a genuine sentiment from Dan Wyatt, of Madison, who is the Americanism Officer for the American Legion Department of South Dakota. But it seems overwrought, at best.

South Dakota has a 99-year history with American Legion baseball, dating back to when it first sprung up in 1925 in Milbank at the state’s Legion convention. The entire organization was only six years old then, created by the nation’s veterans who served in World War I. There’s too much history and tradition tied up in the format for the state to up and leave it behind.

Minnesota, Nebraska and North Dakota are among the nearby states that have spring high school baseball and summer Legion baseball, and those states make it work. There’s no reason South Dakota can’t continue its summer standard of Legion baseball. When some teams play 50 to 60 games, the Legion season has also been a strong opportunity for serious baseball players to get in a lot of games in June and July and have a window to potentially be recruited by college coaches.

Prep

SDHSAA takes first step toward considering baseball as sanctioned sport

An American Legion representative pushed back on the idea of sanctioning high school baseball with concerns it would lead to the end of Legion baseball in South Dakota.

Apr 17

 · 

By  Landon Dierks

When the sanctioning topic was put on the SDHSAA agenda last month, baseball was suggested as a spring or summer sport. There’s a lot of headaches involved with the SDHSAA sponsoring a sport in June or July and the Legion leaders could be rightly worried if that’s the case.

But summer high school baseball seems completely infeasible, and SDHSAA Executive Director Dan Swartos and others indicated they didn’t want to threaten the current summer setup for Legion baseball and all of the other events that take place over the summer, not the least of which includes families trying to take vacations. So the rest is just posturing from Legion leaders.

If the question is sanctioning high school baseball or not in the spring, that seems like it will be a tough call. The question is different from the one around softball, which was brought on line with the SDHSAA in 2023. Unlike how softball was set up, spring club baseball in South Dakota is far more robust and well-organized.

There are pros and cons, of course. If the SDHSAA brings baseball under its umbrella, high school baseball could realistically move to three classes like softball, basketball and volleyball, which could be a good competitive change. The SDHSAA state championships are a big deal and sanctioning would raise the profile of those state tournaments.

However, will sanctioning high school baseball bring more teams on board? It doesn’t seem likely, as the current spring alignment has the state well covered on the map. Small schools with tighter budgets aren’t going to want to add baseball.

There are 179 schools in the South Dakota High School Activities Association, and 74 of them are involved in spring baseball currently, according to the SD High School Baseball Association website, making up 59 teams. (Three notables — Aberdeen, Spearfish and Watertown — only play summer Legion baseball.)

The current setup includes athletes from some of the smallest schools in the state, including Marion, Montrose, Corsica-Stickney, Hitchcock-Tulare and Sioux Falls Lutheran. Will those schools continue to participate when they have to take on the costs of sponsoring the sport, rather than giving a club sport blessing and wiping their hands on the obligations of supporting baseball? Currently, spring teams have to fundraise to maintain their existence, paying for umpires, uniforms and travel.

So those are (some of) the stakes involved with the sanctioning decision with high school baseball. No matter what, the goal should be to do no harm to growing the sport in the state, which is currently in a strong position. That is with more momentum from the spring club and independent season than anything.

For the SDHSAA, it’s going to be a hard and tough decision, one that should be made carefully if it’s going to happen.