Panhandle Baseball Conference

Sorry for the Hiatus...

2011-05-04T13:59:00.000-07:00

Sorry, its been a long and dreary winter, and we are now getting closer and closer to the start of the summer baseball programs. Many teams are already practicing, and getting prepared for their first games. Please stay tuned for a schedule of conference games and a new website (still under construction). Good luck to all the teams in the Panhandle Baseball Conference.

Fist Panhandle Baseball Conference Statistic Leaders

2010-06-09T11:43:00.000-07:00

FOR THE WEEK ENDING 6/4/2010:

PITCHING

WINS
Carlos Palomo Gering 3
Jeremy Burgener Gering 2
Zach Smith Gering 2
Slade Hunn Chadron 2
Nick Mitchell Chadron 2

SAVES
Brady Roes Chadron 2
Colin Chatterton Gering 1
Austin Miller Sidney 1

ERA (minimum 10 innings pitched)
Jeremy Burgener Gering 1.38
Carlos Palomo Gering 1.47
Zach Smith Gering 2.21
Slade Hunn Chadron 3.50
Austin Miller Sidney 3.68

STRIKEOUTS
Carlos Palomo Gering 33
Jeremy Burgener Gering 19
Tanner Letcher Chadron 14
Zach Smith Gering 14
Austin Miller Sidney 13

HITTING

AVG (minimum 20 at bats)
Brady Roes Chadron .512
Alex Bond Sidney .500
Trent Kuhn Chadron .500
Zach Smith Gering .486
Jonothan Houser Sidney .480

HOME RUNS
Jeremy Burgener Gering 1
Zach Smith Gering 1

HITS
Brady Roes Chadron 22
Trent Kuhn Chadron 21
Bret Hutchison Gering 18
Zach Smith Gering 17
Wyatt Blome Chadron 15

TRIPLES
Brady Roes Chadron 2
Nathan Marquez Gering 2
4 others tied with 1

STOLEN BASES
Riley Stack Chadron 11
Brady Roes Chadron 10
Zach Smith Gering 9
Nathan Marquez Gering 9
Trent Kuhn Chadron 8

RBI
Brady Roes Chadron 13
Zach Smith Gering 12
Trent Kuhn Chadron 12
Bret Hutchison Gering 12
Jeremy Burgener Gering 11

TEAMS NOT REPORTING: ALLIANCE, CHAPPELL

It's Getting Closer...

2010-04-20T08:12:00.000-07:00

Baseball season is almost here. I am tweaking and experimenting with this website to see if there is a way we can post stats overall. I would ask all coaches in the conference to send me updated stats every Monday to djones_atc_cscs@yahoo.com I will then put the stats together in a spreadsheet format and put them on the website, as well as send them to the newspapers and radio stations. I will also email out the stats out to the coaches.
If you have any local media that you would like to receive the stats, please let me know that as well.
Best of luck to everyone in the upcoming season. Hope practice is going well!
-Doug

New Logo!!!

2010-03-01T21:30:00.000-08:00

The new logo on the right of this webpage is courtesy of Tom Swanson in Alliance. Thanks Tom for taking the time to design the logo!

Getting Out in the Media

2010-02-11T07:04:00.000-08:00

In what is the first of many (hopefully) blurbs in the media, please check out this article that appeared in the Chadron Record on Tuesday, Feb. 9th.

http://www.thechadronnews.com/articles/2010/02/10/chadron/sports/doc4b71ba78a9190434560925.txt

Another Team has joined us!

2010-02-03T07:38:00.000-08:00

We would like to Welcome the Sidney Legion Baseball Program to the Panhandle Baseball Conference. A great big thank you to the teams and their board members from Alliance, Chadron, Chappell, Gering and Sidney who are making this venture possible. Can't wait for summer to get here and get back to the diamond and start playing!

Off-season summer activities in other sports hurting Legion baseball?

2010-02-03T07:30:00.001-08:00

The following is a post from Huskerland Preps blogger Mister Mojo. He has some great points that really effect us out here in Western Nebraska.

A problem that I'm becoming increasingly aware of is that Legion baseball in a lot of smaller towns is getting killed by basketball, wrestling and football activities during the summer. In schools that have spring baseball (and the spring coach is usually the summer coach), there's much better cooperation among the coaches that helps baseball fend off encroachment during the summer season. But if schools don't have spring baseball, those football, basketball and wrestling coaches don't have to face a baseball coach every day in the hallways, and they don't have someone pushing them to schedule summer practices and workouts around the Legion baseball schedule.

When I wrote the series of articles about multi-sport athletes last fall (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3), I heard a lot of good stuff about AD's who are trying to coordinate what happens in the summer to make sure that Legion baseball (which is connected to their spring program) remains viable. What I heard AD's say over and over is that the sport in season gets priority. And if they have a spring baseball program, they extend that protection to Legion baseball. For those schools, Legion baseball is the "sport in season" during the summer, and other coaches are supposed to respect that.

I know that it's probably not perfect in lots of Class A and B baseball schools, but at least you've got someone in those schools -- the AD and the baseball coach -- trying to make it work. Without spring baseball in the school, that protection goes away and baseball becomes very vulnerable to the pressures of the high school coaches in other sports. Unless you have the AD invested in your Legion baseball program (because it's tied to his spring baseball program), summer baseball becomes the whipping boy. In schools that don't have spring baseball, Legion baseball may be thought of as more of a summer recreational activity than a significant sport, certainly not as important as the sports that are played in those high schools. And we all know that coaches are aggressive, competitive guys. If there is an opportunity to make their football or basketball or wrestling program better during the summer, they're going to get after it -- and there goes your baseball team.

This is a very big problem in lots of small towns across Nebraska -- even in places like Wakefield, the baseball capital of Nebraska. Coach Eaton probably has enough clout up there to get the AD's attention, but other sports are chipping away slowly but surely.

My point is ... we need to get spring baseball going in some of those "at risk" Legion baseball towns before the Legion baseball programs get totally killed by other sports.

I kind of feel like the clock is ticking. The more I learn about the problem, the more I realize that there's some urgency about getting spring baseball up and running.

I would be very interested in hearing comments from folks on this topic, especially from Legion ballplayers who are directly affected. To what extent are the high school coaches of the "major" sports -- football, basketball and wrestling -- pushing you to forget about Legion baseball and focus on their sport during the summer? How strongly are those "suggestions" worded? Do you feel that you really have a choice in the matter?

Baseball Playing Quarterbacks

2010-02-03T07:30:00.000-08:00

Here is another posting from www.baseballnebraska.com that features Gering's Patrick O'Boyle.
To read the full story, go to http://www.baseballnebraska.com/baseball_football_part_3.htm

Multi-Sport Athletes in an Era of Specialization

2010-02-03T07:26:00.000-08:00

The following is a posting from www.baseballnebraska.com, more specifically the metropreps.com blog on 11/16/2009. I think it has a lot of relevance to us out here in Western Nebraska:

Even in northern states like Nebraska baseball has become a year-round sport . With the growth of fall baseball teams, camps and showcases and the coming of bigger and better indoor baseball training facilities, opportunties exist to work on one’s baseball skills throughout the fall and winter sports seasons. And, there are plenty of good reasons to do so. It’s a competitive world out there. A few extra swings off the “Iron Mike” might be the difference between making the baseball team and starting a summer lawn mowing business. And, at the team level, the extra reps over the fall and winter could mean the difference between playing for a championship or watching from the stands. As a society, we value, and have to come to expect, excellence. The straightest path to the winner’s circle seems to be commitment, hard work and focused, repetitive training in our chosen pursuit.

All well and good, and certainly players in a skill sport like baseball benefit from year-round drills and instruction on the building blocks of the game. But, at the same time one could certainly ask the question “at what point in the life of young athlete should he or she begin to focus on just one sport?” When baseball — or football or basketball or soccer, for that matter — becomes a year-round activity, the opportunities for a young athlete to participate in other sports diminish. What is lost when that happens?

After talking to seventeen multi-sport athletes, their coaches and athletic directors this fall for our series on baseball-playing quarterbacks, my understanding of the benefits and challenges of multi-sport participation has been broadened. Here are a few of the things I’ve learned:

1. The multi-sport athlete benefits from competing in a variety of different situations. Many of the athletes I talked to spoke of being able to transfer what they’ve learned from one sport to another. Whether it’s a physical quality, such as strength or agility, or a mental attribute, such as the ability to focus and concentrate, there seem to be some core components that are common to all sports. Developing those core components under fire in varying competitive situations seems to give the athlete greater confidence in his ability to compete and succeed in each of the sports in which he participates.

2. The training for some sports emphasize certain of these core athletic components more than others. Football emphasizes aggressiveness, one-on-one challenges, strength, speed, bursts of quickness and power. Basketball emphasizes footwork, vision, leaping ability, aerobic conditioning, coordination, quick decision-making and precision. Baseball emphasizes hand-eye coordination, arm strength, lateral movement, timing, precise repetitive motions, speed and quickness. Likewise, sports such as wrestling, swimming and diving, soccer, tennis and golf each develop a unique collection of core athletic components. When an athlete brings a broader range of well-developed athletic abilities to a particular sport, he has a “deeper well” to draw from. He has more unique abilities to contribute to his team. A team composed of individuals with a broad base of athletic experiences and abilities is going to able to respond better under adverse or novel circumstances since the players collectively have a broader range of experiences to draw from.

3. Coaches and athletic directors have gotten the message that opportunities for athletes to play multiple sports must be encouraged and facilitated. Top players can no longer be “hoarded” by a particular coach who wants those kids exclusively for his program. In order for all of the teams from a school to be successful, coaches must share athletes and cooperate with one another. Athletic directors, it appears, have become very proactive in promoting the kind of cooperation and coordination among their coaches that makes it possible for multi-sport athletes to avoid conflicting demands from coaches.

4. Baseball is attracting the top multi-sport athletes in many schools. That’s very good news for our sport. As a sport, Nebraska high school baseball is better off if we have the state’s top athletes among our ranks rather than having them competing in track or soccer. The signs are very encouraging so far, but we lag far behind in attracting African-American athletes to our sport. Of the seventeen baseball-playing quarterbacks we interviewed, only one was an African-American. Of course, this problem is not unique to Nebraska high school baseball, but is a major challenge for the sport of baseball at all levels, including Major League Baseball.

At the end of the day, not every kid who has good baseball skills is going to have the athletic ability to compete at the varsity level in multiple sports. Baseball is a skill game, and kids who may not stand out in terms of their overall athletic ability may still be successful ballplayers if given the opportunities to develop those skills through good teaching and persistent effort. For those kids, year-round baseball opportunities may provide the key to a successful career at the high school level and beyond. But we should also encourage and provide opportunities for the talented, multi-sport athlete to do what he or she does best — compete year round in a variety of sports to maximize his or her athletic potential.

If we can put together a baseball team of both kinds of players — the skilled baseball player and the naturally-gifted, multi-sport athlete — then perhaps we have the best of all possible worlds for Nebraska high school baseball.

Welcome!!

2009-12-10T14:33:00.000-08:00

Please see the following email that I have sent out regarding the Panhandle Baseball Conference. Please let me know if you have any questions. Please email me at djones_atc_cscs@yahoo.com
Thanks!

Greetings all!

I know this idea has been tossed around a bit now, but Mike Jones and I were re-discussing the idea of creating a "Panhandle Conference" for Legion Baseball. This would be of several benefits for all of us, I believe. Please hear me out, and let me know what you think.

Since we do not have high school baseball out here in Western Nebraska, we would like to create a "Panhandle Conference" (or other suitable name) that would include (but not limited to) the teams in Class B, Area 7. Since the state office does not release the list of Area teams until June, we would assume that Alliance, Chadron, Chappell, Gering, Ogallala and Sidney will be Class B, Area 7. We could also include Gordon/Rushville, or even teams such as Bayard who are just getting started again.

We would use this "conference" as an easier way to schedule, and would like to compile stats throughout the season, and have them published in the Star-Herald here in Scottsbluff, as well as your local newspaper. I think the local news media would eat this up. I am envisioning a "statistics page" with conference leaders in Batting Average, ERA, Saves, Doubles, Triples, HR, RBI, etc. We could also keep a "Conference Standings" page that would weekly put our teams names out there in the newspaper. Maybe we could even start a webpage.

We would also be able to create "All-Conference" teams for both Junior and Senior teams. Again, since we do not have High School Baseball, this would be a way to recognize those athletes who do tremendous work on the ballfield during the summer. We would select 8 position players and 3 pitchers for all-conference, plus an overall conference MVP, an Offensive MVP and a Defensive MVP for both Junior and Senior Teams. The nominations would be collected by a "chairperson" and voted upon by the coaches.

Please let me know what you think about this. We think this would be beneficial for the teams in Western Nebraska to help get baseball more recognized. I would be willing to handle the footwork for this endeavor this season, unless someone else wanted to step up and volunteer.

Thanks for your time.

Doug Jones
Gering B&C Steel Juniors Coach