I started the “Baseball in America Tour 2014” at the Snowbird Baseball Classic in Port Charlotte, Florida. I have attended 15 NCAA D1 & D3 games at this event, it was started by Steve Partington and his wife Shannon. Steve is a retired college baseball umpire who has been involved with baseball all his life. He was a college baseball umpire for over 30 years. This event started on February 14th and runs through March 22nd. The last 3 games I have watched were at the Gene Cusic Collegiate Classic in Fort Myers, Florida and runs the entire month of March, teams in this event are D3 and NAIA schools. The Lee County Parks and Recreation Department has run this classic for the past 24 years.
These events offer Men’s NCAA and NAIA Baseball teams an opportunity to participate in regular season games during their schools spring break. Approximately 500 teams come from many of the cold winter climate states and represent NCAA D1, D2, D3 and NAIA schools. If you like college baseball, Florida is the place to be during the February and March. There are these types of “classics” all over south Florida and bring in millions of dollars to the local economies. I just want to clarify that these are not tournaments, just a way for the schools to get some “dirt time”…
Well I am going to end this post on that note, I need a few days to mentally recuperate from the first 30 days of daily blogging, I wanted to give a quick shout out to these events where I have spent a lot of time. I did find an interesting story for tomorrow at todays game, so look for that!
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