Boys Baseball History & Champions

The second year of the conference, they established the baseball program. There were many great teams and players within the conference. McNabb Swaney took home the first baseball conference trophy in 1927 (1927-28 school year).

Baseball was first played as a fall sport. It was so popular, they established a summer program, too. The summer program was called the Tri County league, but included some teams outside of the school conference participating schools. In 1979, they established a tournament for conference play. Putnam County took home the first trophy for the baseball tournament. The tournament only lasted until the 1996-97 school year. Many times it became difficult to play all of the conference games and the tournament in the fall because of the weather. In 1999 (1999-2000 school year), they moved the conference to the spring season. This also aligned with the state series played in the spring.

Throughout the years, many schools had to “consolidate” their teams to have enough players to field a team. This was called a co-op team. One school would serve as the host school and the team would fall under their school sports program even though team members were from another school. So, the number of conference teams varied from sport to sport.

In the 1930’s, schools were looking for ways to save a little money for the sports programs. In the area of baseball, they decided to change to a game known as Kittenball. It was played with a larger ball, no gloves were needed, and the catcher didn’t need all of the protective gear usually worn in baseball. It was played a few years and the game was referred to many times as playground ball or softball. Don’t know if it was the name of the game or the game itself, that didn’t catch on but it was only played about eight years by some of the conference schools. Baseball was still played by some of the schools and Kittenball faded out as a sport. We can not find any records of Kittenball actually being a conference sport.

*A slash (/) indicates Co-Op Teams