고정된 트윗
Dear College Baseball Coaches,
My name is Chris Dorsey and I am the Head Coach & General Manager of the Richland Post 215 American Legion Baseball team in Columbia South Carolina. We have 2 Junior Legion teams 17U and a Senior team 19U. We currently have 58 kids playing in our program and we just started the Legion program back in our area last year after a 10 year absence. To say I'm blown away with the enthusiasm, participation and support for our program in just one year would be an understatement. I'm an entrepreneur by trade and like any entrepreneur we look for opportunities and when we find one we figure out if there is a way to make it successful and do it better than the competition. So what I saw with American Legion Baseball was an opportunity and the competition was really travel baseball. Everyone wants to bash travel baseball for a variety of reasons but the fact is there aren't any other options in our area for HS players other than playing for TB organizations. So as a recent empty nester with a passion to help young people, and a love for baseball I saw the opportunity to bring American Legion Baseball back to our community as my calling for the next chapter of my life. So I jumped all in to learn as much as I could about ALB. MY first conversation happened organically as I ran into Derek Urquhart at a HS baseball game that he was coaching. Derek is a true baseball guy that I was following on Twitter and was always intrigued that ALB was so big in his area. I went up to him and introduced myself and we hit it off. Derek has been the Coach of Florence Post 1 for about 20 years and a Gamecock Hall of Famer who played many years in the Minor League's. Derek has built a blueprint on how to build a Legion program. He runs his program with dignity and class and has made playing for Florence Post 1 a status symbol for all elite players in the Pee Dee area. If you play for Post 1 it means you are good! So now I had my idea, blueprint, enthusiasm and passion to start putting together a ALB team for the 2022 Summer. I immediately called up my Son and his best friends who happened to be the best players in our area and they all had just graduated and really had no place to play. I pitched the idea of playing ALB and they loved it. Phillips Daniels who now plays baseball at Citadel and has always been a leader in our community was instrumental in putting together our team and we really did it in about 30 days. So once we got the team registered and bought Uniforms it was literally time to play. I was surprised to find out that there were 28 Sr ALB teams in the state of SC so we got our league schedule and then I started asking non-league teams to play us. Derek was nice enough to schedule us along w a few other good teams because they probably didn't think we would be any good in our first year. My players had no idea what to expect and I really didn't either other than hearing that Florence Post 1 was always really good. From the 1st game we played against Lancaster and until the last game we played in the State Championship tournament against Greenwood I was absolutely blown away with the competition. It was far better than I thought and every night we saw a college arm and talented players on every team. In fact Zander Buchan who now plays for the Gamecocks and attended the MLB draft combine last summer said that was the best competition he had ever faced and he's played TB all over the country. We ended up finishing 4th in the State the 1st year and exceeded our expectations but the taste it left the players, coaches and parents was one of a great pride and a true sense of community. In summary this was what we all had been missing in baseball. Just like most all of the current College coaches we all grew up playing for our community and with our community and some of our greatest memories were made playing ball with our band of brothers from our local community.
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