How important is USSSA "World Series" title?

Dixie Youth started as a Jim Crow answer to the desegregation of Little League, Inc. It has hung around mostly as a rural southern answer to Little League. Where I'm from, the bigger towns play Little League (well, mostly they now play select ball, but that's a different animal altogether) and the small towns play Dixie because they don't want to have to beat the bigger towns to win a state title (fair enough, I suppose). It's like Little League is for the areas that have 4A and 5A schools and Dixie is for the areas with 1A, 2A and 3A schools.

Funny thing: One year, we had a local Dixie team advance to the World Series and all but three players were black. I thought it was ironic considering the roots of Dixie baseball.

 

Another tournament is Ripken Tournaments. I don't know how or if it's affiliated with Babe Ruth Baseball, but it's another organization that will take a traveling team's money and put it in a tournament in one of two locales, Aberdeen, Md. or Myrtle Beach, S.C. You've got to be careful, because some coaches may call it in as a Cal Ripken game when it's isn't.

 

PRICELESS

 

Other than one small community in the southern end of our readership base, we don't have Little League. We have Babe Ruth/Cal Ripken. And in order to get to the Cal Ripken World Series in Aberdeen, Md. - aside: awesome facility - teams had to win district, then state/substate and then regionals. Only teams to make it to state or regionals without winning/finishing second in a previous tournament were the host teams (to make sure you've got decent attendance for at least two games).

We hosted 1-of-8 regionals for 12-year-olds last week. We went all out, writing 20 articles on the thing (18 gamers, announcement of pairings, coverage of opening ceremonies). Single copy sales, with eight groups of 20 or more out-of-town people in town for five days, went through the roof. Online photo sales through mycapture are up.

If the host team had won the tournament (eliminated on Day 3 of 5), we would have gone to Aberdeen. Now if Aberdeen was 1-of-11 "Nationals", we would NOT have.

Same thing with all the cheerleading JamFest Nationals (which all seem to happen within a four-hour drive from the office and never involve any team/squad west of the Mississippi or north of Ohio).

 

BrianGriffin nailed this one on the head. Spike, I agree with you but I would have just run the pic. I get pics like that all the time and I run them, two columns wide. All info in the cutline and no story attached. That satisfies people and I don't get any complaints.
People love seeing their name in the paper.

 

Cal Ripken is age 7-12 of Babe Ruth. It's not one of those scam ASA or USSSA travel ball deals.

 

The coach actually wrote a decent recap of the week, including stats and whatnot...so every one (worthy) of getting their name in the paper did (both pitchers, the girls that made the all-WS team, etc...) and I didn't tick the coach off by ignoring his "hard work" in giving me a 250 word write-up. I think just running a pic would have gotten more grief (from him especially) than running a headline/story as I did.

Oh, and our monthy paper for that community will be re-running the story and pic together...so all is (sort of) well.

 

I forgot to clarify - Ripken Tournaments is not the same as Babe Ruth Baseball, nor the same as Babe Ruth's Cal Ripken division.