Staff Photo by D. Patrick Harding

AT&T Field, home of the Chattanooga Lookouts,has added new signage over the main entrance to the stadium, recognizing the team's new affiliation with the LA Dodgers.

The Greater Chattanooga Sports & Events Committee again is bidding to bring the TSSAA Spring Fling home, and this year's presentation will include a vaunted venue: AT&T Field.

For the first time since the Spring Fling left Chattanooga, which birthed and hosted the event from 1994 to 2002, AT&T Field will be included in the Sports Committee's bid package. Chattanooga lost the event to Memphis in 2003-04 and to Murfreesboro for the past five years, when the Sports Committee pitched aging Engel Stadium as its primary baseball site.

The home of the Chattanooga Lookouts since 2000, AT&T Field has a capacity of 6,340 and is within walking distance of more than a dozen downtown eateries.

"It's sort of everything when it comes to the baseball portion of the bid to be able to offer AT&T Field," Sports Committee president Scott Smith said Tuesday. "This will give us that championship venue that we didn't really have otherwise."

Bids to host the 2010-11 Spring Flings are due Monday, with the presentations scheduled for Aug. 17 in Murfreesboro.

AT&T Field opened for Spring Fling when the Southern League's scheduling format became more consistent annually with the adoption of five-game series in 2006. The league allows half of its franchises to host games July 3 and the other half July 4, and it does the same thing for the Saturday and Sunday before Memorial Day.

The Lookouts host a game the Sunday before Memorial Day, which means they are out of town the preceding five or six days, coinciding with Spring Fling. Next year's Spring Fling has been set for May 24-29.

"It will work, and I've told them for 10 years that they could use it if we were out of town," Lookouts owner Frank Burke said. "There will be a small fee for cleanup, and that's it."