Hoosier Hawk

Agreed. Might have been a fun conference when Caston had a bigger roster. When you're excited to get a guy back from injury to get you to 16 guys... Ouch. I knew the day they joined the HNAC that it would be pretty rough on Caston Football program. The old MWC was tough for a school like Caston to compete, but the HNAC is much tougher.

I could be mistaken but I'm pretty sure that the rule is that you have 120 pitches. If you face a batter with 119, you may finish the hitter. It's the IHSAA's fault for putting coaches in this situation to exploit this rule. If I'm a coach, I go to my senior pitcher and say, "Here's the deal. We're gonna win this game with you on the bump, but you'll be suspended in the next round of the tournament. You in?" It's truly sad that the tournament is drastically influenced by these pitch count rules. Enforce them in the regular season, let the best team win in the tournament. Plenty of older guys I knew threw 140 some pitches in a tournament run, went on to play college baseball, grew up to be great employees, husbands, fathers, coaches, etc and wouldn't change it for the world.

If the pitch count rule is here to stay, the IHSAA needs to consider opening up the season a week earlier. I understand that mid-March weather can be a little... "brisk" but every now and then there are a couple of decent days. It also allows you to get your practices in earlier. There are several rainouts over the course of the season and if you're not one of the lucky ones to dodge most of the weather, you lose games and have to find short windows to fit them in... and that's if you even have the pitching available.

The pitch count needs to be re-evaluated IHSAA had an opportunity to do the right thing in the Scecina/South Vermillion situation last year. - Scecina Ace throws over his daily allotted pitches and Scecina advances - Indiana bylaws state that this would result in a forfeiture of that game. When the infraction is discovered, they do not make Scecina forfeit and instead force the kid to be suspended for 1 game (semi-state) instead. The blame should have fallen on the coaching staff but instead it was taken out on the kid. Not fair for anyone involved. Pitch count also forced a kid out of the game early in which he was completely dominating and they end up losing. Can't remember which 4A matchup that was. One other general issue I've seen is when faced with an Umpire who is inconsistent or has a "tight" zone. Unnecessarily jacking up pitch counts as well as putting strain on weekly pitching rotations. The rule isn't completely off base, but needs some discussion.

Whoops, wrong class!

Can't believe nobody has put Mount Vernon Fortville for 5A with their latest facility upgrade!

Sure... But quality over quantity. It's a good hire to anyone who can look deeper than the top line of their team schedule on John Harrell's website.