Published: May 04, 2008 10:33 pm            

CORY ISENBERG | Johnstown wins praise from WVIAC

Overall, Johnstown received high marks from the players, coaches and administrative officials in the West Virginia Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (WVIAC) after hosting the baseball tournament this past weekend.

“It’s been wonderful being here,” Will Prewitt, associate commissioner of the WVIAC, said. “It’s been pretty much unanimous with the players and coaches. There’s a ‘wow’ factor when you walk into the ballpark. It’s such a beautiful facility and a great, unique baseball park.”

Prior to coming to Pennsylvania, the tournament has been held for the past 18 seasons at Hunnicutt Field in Princeton, W.Va.

Point Stadium and it’s turf surface in particular were well received by the five visiting schools from West Virginia.

“This is our second trip to Johnstown, we actually played here in the initial weekend series with UPJ,” Alderson-Broaddus coach Milan Rasic said. “In terms of the presentation and the facility, all the players, coaches and staff members were given an outstanding venue to sort the tournament out in. We’ve enjoyed coming here. It’s a great place to play baseball.”

Prewitt said that the turf field facilitated the tournament’s crowded schedule over the three days.

“This turf field, you don’t have to worry about rain delays and coming back out to fix the field,” he said. “We’ve had a couple bumps in the road, but we’ve been able to administer the tournament so much easier. I think I altered the tournament schedule last year nine times. This year, I had to move a couple games from UPJ to here, but we were great after that. The new turf is such a big selling point. Everything’s so compressed and you have to get games in so quickly.”

Prewitt was impressed with the community’s backing of the tournament.

“We don’t have many championships where we’ve been able to draw broad community support,” Prewitt said. “We’re really excited and we’ve learned a lot of things in this first year being here.”

The Pitt-Johnstown Mountain Cats, in their first year of participation in the WVIAC, were eliminated in two games from the tournament.

“As far as crowd goes, UPJ losing their first two didn’t help with the crowds,” Prewitt said. “The crowds here have been pretty typical. Division II and college baseball as a whole really isn’t a huge spectator sport unfortunately.”

There are some tweaks and additions that the conference would like to add next year, the second in the three-year contract, in order to enhance the event.

“We hope we can add Thursday to the tournament next year so we’re not quite so compacted,” Prewitt said. “It gives us a little more room if we get bad weather.

“And we’ve talked about is having a coaches clinic for little league kids in the Johnstown area and trying to add a little pomp and circumstance with an opening-night ceremony. There are some things that we want to try to do to grow the attendance.”



Cory Isenberg is a sports writer for The Tribune-Democrat.

        

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