ASHEBORO – The South Atlantic Conference is moving its baseball tournament’s championship series to Asheboro’s McCrary Park next month.
The NCAA Division II league was in a pinch to find a new venue and chose Asheboro, with the Asheboro ZooKeepers acting as hosts.
“We reached out to them,” SAC commissioner Patrick Britz said. “We were able to work something out. … We’re only a month out. We had to move pretty quickly.”
The best-of-3 finals are set for May 10 and 11 (and May 12, if necessary).
The SAC Tournament finals had been held in recent years at Smokies Stadium in Kodak, Tenn. The championship series was slated to be there again this year, but another event on the same weekend in that facility’s parking lot would have interfered with tournament operations.
“It wasn’t going to be a good experience with that,” Britz said.
SAC officials, including outgoing associate commissioner of championships Christian Stryker, checked on a few possible destinations. Asheboro is bit outside the main geographic footprint for the conference, and the selection was made without an in-person visit from league officials.
“We’re willing to try it out,” Britz said. “I can’t speak to the longevity of the situation. We were trying to put a Baid-Aid on it. But it’s something that we could see as more long term if it works for us and for Asheboro.”
One issue that came up with SAC coaches was that McCrary Park has artificial turf, while Smokies Stadium has real grass and that’s what SAC members are accustomed to. There’s also a positive flip side to that topic.
“It does minimize the chance for rainouts,” said Britt, who’s in his 16th year with the Rock Hill, S.C.-based conference.
In-state schools among the 13 league members are Catawba, Lenoir-Rhyne, Mars Hill and Wingate. Other schools are based in South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia. Newberry is the defending regular-season and tournament champion.
Two tournament finalists are determined based on the winners of two, four-team brackets playing double-elimination rounds at the homes of the conference’s Nos. 1 and 2 seeds. Then, it’s off to Asheboro.
“We like the neutral site as much as we can for our championships,” Britz said.
Attendance for the title series varies, Britz said, usually based on the two qualifying teams. Carson-Newman’s campus was nearby when games were played in Kodak. A crowd of a few hundred people might be the maximum expected, he said.
The SAC had played past baseball tournaments at Forest City, which has a team, like the ZooKeepers, in the summer collegiate Coastal Plain League.
