Iowa Central is good also. There’s definitely a big range from those teams and some of the guys on the bottom feeder teams. Marshalltown, Iowa Lakes struggle and North Iowa just started a program so they struggle too.
High School Sports Thread
- Thread starter qwerty
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Don’t know all he circumstances,but sportsmanship seems to be lacking. Not intentionally play bad, but try other combinations and mix JV into varsity. I would be embarrassed if I was a parent of the winning teams.
How long do you have to play to not be just started? NIACC started baseball in 1931.
Sorry, not NIACC.
I meant Northeast Iowa CC (NICC) west of Dubuque. Last year was their first year as a program. Then there’s also Northeastern CC in Nebraska that plays with the Iowa teams. Confusing as hell.
While not quite to this extent I’ve seen some games where the benches get emptied and it’s still not competitive.
Indian Hills in Centerville used to be the gold standard for baseball, but they have gone through a couple of coaching changes over the past 5 years and struggle to a couple games over .500 this season.
Muscatine baseball lost 3-2 to Bettendorf (@ Bettendorf) on a 2 out hit in bottom of last inning. Player that got the winning hit was the son of a guy who was a star baseball player at Muscatine in his HS days.
Such is life.
Such is life.
Another new staff this year. The last few years they would have tons of international guys and guys from around the country. They signed more Iowa guys this year. Iowa Western becoming a power, plus the others JUCOs doing better getting guys to D1 has hurt Indian Hills. Tougher place to recruit than some of the others too. Guessing they used to sign guys that never visited or met in person given the geographic spread of their roster. I’m guessing that wasn’t good for a program either.
KidSilverhair
Well-Known Member
Indian Hills, proud alma mater of Cleveland Indians legend and San Francisco Giants broadcaster Duane Kuiper!
(For some definitions of legend, anyhow.)
The former coaches relied heavily on getting kids out of PR, I think that pipeline has ended. It was that pipeline that caused the former coach to get in trouble and be forced out. IHCC like a lot of JC's took their kids up to work football and basketball games at ISU and Iowa, with the money being paid to the school to help support the bb program. The problem was its illegal to allow kids from outside the US to work in these programs, and IHCC was with the coach putting in names of relatives instead of the players real names and having them work. Once it came out he was forced out along with the president of the college at Centerville quickly retiring.
Only. hit one homer his entire career and it came off future Cy Young winner Steve Stone. Stone has repeatedly said when they are in SF, Kuiper never lets him forgot it.
I don’t think high school baseball in southern Iowa has been the best the last five or 10 years.
Moravia is having a fine season, 20 game winning streak and plays Martindale St. Mary's in the substate final. They are 26- 4 being lead by Bill Huisman, who won his 1,000th game a couple of weeks ago, he won two state championships at Centerville and now is at Moravia coaching his grand son.
They had kids from PR, the DR, Taiwan, Japan, Canada, Venezuela, and the US kids were mostly from Colorado, then scattered around various states. I never understood how these kids all end up at Indian Hills, and how coaches got these kids here. And if you are getting kids from all over the place, why they weren't better.
Baseball in Iowa over the past 10 years or so has really gotten bimodal. Lots of kids at an early age doing training, travel ball, the whole works, especially in central and eastern Iowa. As a whole it is still mediocre, but now there are enough college level players to field good JuCos and provide a respectable Big 10 team most of its roster. There are several SEC bound guys in HS in Iowa now, and guys transferring there from mid-majors, such as a kid from CR playing at South Dakota state now transferring to Miss. State.
So I would say there's way more of a gap between the good teams and players and the bottom than ever.
Walker, the coach was from Canada which had to help bringing in kids from his home country. Not sure how they got their pipeline in the Caribbean going but they were bringing in a lot of kids from down there every year. They had really fallen off his last 3 to 5 years and that is what started the grumbling. BB is the only sport at IHCC in Centerville, everything else is on the Ottumwa campus. So that program got a lot of attention from the town. When they started struggling, they were looking for a way to force him out and used the visa problem as a way to get it done.
