After going a whole year with no competition, the Seymour Youth League for baseball and softball is up and running this spring.
The league began playing games April 26 and has been playing ever since then.
“We normally start the first week of May, but we started earlier this year,” said Brandon Terrell, athletic director at the Boys and Girls Club of Seymour.
The league play its games at Kasting Park and Shields Park. For baseball, the ages start out at the peewee level and go up to sixth-graders. For softball, it goes from the T-ball age all the way up to around 13 years old.
Terrell just started his position at the Boys and Girls Club around a month ago, and one of his first orders of business was to get the baseball and softball leagues up and running again.
Terrell’s dad is on the youth league board, and Terrell was recommended to run things.
“When I got this position and we were gradually taking over the youth league, I figured why not keep the money in-house and we can save a lot of money for equipment or whatever we need for the league as a whole,” Terrell said.
The lack of interest and participation hasn’t been an issue for Terrell this spring. There were even parents from other counties who asked to come join the youth league in Seymour.
The only issue sometimes is finding enough umpires to be at every game. Terrell usually finds himself umping games multiple times throughout the week. But now that all of the baseball and softball seasons for high school are over in Jackson County, Terrell hopes he will have more volunteers.
That was the case this Tuesday, where one of Trinity’s top players in Lawson Woods helped ump a game.
When dividing up the teams for the season, they try to create an even playing ground.
“We try to even the teams out. Of course, we want every team to have the same chance to win,” Terrell said. “The players that we know, we kind of sort them out. The players we don’t know, we try to place them on a team based on what school they go to. So if there’s a kid we don’t know that goes to Emerson (Elementary School), we’ll put him on a team that has a couple Emerson kids.”
Perhaps the biggest thing the youth league has provided this spring is a feeling of normalcy for all of the younger kids to be able to go out and play sports, something that wasn’t available last spring.
It created environments like Tuesday night, where three different games are going on at Kasting Park with families and friends in attendance to watch.
Moments like Chase Sizemore getting to score a run for the Red Sox third/fourth grade team, Jacob Toppe throwing strikeouts on the mound for the White Sox third/fourth grade team or Dacie Hughes making solid plays at first base for the purple team (Seymour Elkins Apartments) during the ages 11-14 softball game.
“I think it’s awesome,” Terrell said. “I’ve had parents mention some things about how their kids were just going wild without sports through the COVID-19 experience. You can tell with the year off how kids were rusty. It jas been picking up now throughout the season, and that has been good to see.”