Clint Albright is always looking for a way to keep his four-decades-old softball tournament fresh, and not everybody can compete in a home run derby, where the winners are almost always the biggest and bulkiest.
So when Albright, Chris Walker and others gather at Sherwood Sports Complex this evening, there will be a new competition in which players of all types can compete just hours before the start of the 34th Busch/Pepsi Softball Classic.
A new base-running competition will be held on Field 11 at 5:30 p.m. There will still be the usual home run derby at 5 p.m., which is expected to include Bobby Hughes, one of Arkansas’ most accomplished softball players, and the Arkansas Softball Hall of Fame induction ceremony will follow at 6 p.m.
Both of those events have been staples of the Busch/ Pepsi Softball Classic for years, but the addition of the base-running competition gives smaller players and women a contest devoted more specifically to them.
“Not everybody is big and strong enough to be in the home run derby. They didn’t even enter it,” Albright said. “So for the smaller guys who don’t get in the home run derby but say, ‘Hey, I can run,’ we’ll have something.”
The rules are simple. A contestant starts at home plate and takes off around the bases, and the stopwatch ends when the player’s foot touches home plate again. There will be a male and a female winner, each of whom will receive a plaque and a new pair of cleats.
It also might settle some bragging rights.
“You hear the argument about the guy that hits it the hardest and the farthest and you get to see that,” said Walker, who is player/coach of the Fence Brokers team based in Bryant. “You always hear the guys talk about who is the fastest, but there’s not a contest. So we’ll figure out who the fastest man in Arkansas is.”
It’s just the latest wrinkle implemented by Albright to keep teams and fans flocking to central Arkansas each July. Today will mark the 34th edition of the tournament, one that started at Little Rock’s Interstate Park, ballooned at one point to more than 160 teams competing at three sites before settling into the slightly more modest tournament that it is now.
This year’s tournament will include 117 teams playing in five different brackets over three days at Sherwood Sports Complex and Burns Park in North Little Rock.
Four of the five returning champions are Arkansas-based teams, including Bryant Express, which has won four of the past six women’s division titles.
The only division won last year by a team outside of Arkansas was the conference division, the most competitive of the men’s divisions. Fence Brokers, Inc. won the division - which consists of teams that compete at the highest level of USSSA for a spot in its world series - from 2009-11 but finished fifth last year, watching The Scene/Hub’s Pub walk away with the title.
That team consisted of players from seven states, with many of them meeting for the first time when they arrived at a North Little Rock hotel before the start of the tournament. The Scene/Hub’s Pub has broken up since, and half of those players have merged with half of the Fence Brokers team from last year to form Fence Brokers/Hub’s Pub.
Fence Brokers/Hub’s Pub has won two tournaments since March and has earned 891 points, which puts them 14th among 46 conference division teams nationwide.
Walker, 45, said combining the teams had more to do with convenience than trying to join up with a team that won last year’s tournament. Fence Brokers/Hub’s Pub has seven players from Arkansas, six from the St. Louis area and one from South Dakota.
“When they approached me last year, I was a little skeptical, but they had the positions that we needed to go along with the core that I kept the last four or five years,” he said. “It was a really good match, a really good group of guys.”34th Busch/Pepsi Softball Classic WHEN Today through Sunday WHERE Sherwood Sports Complex and Burns Park in North Little Rock ADMISSION $10 three-day pass; $4 single day; children 12 and younger admitted free.
DIVISION FINALS Men’s conference (10:50 a.m. Sunday); Men’s C (4:45 p.m. Sunday); Men’s D (5:20 p.m. Sunday); Men’s E (5:20 p.m. Sunday); Women’s B (10:10 p.m. Sunday).
Sports, Pages 21 on 07/05/2013