Wiedmer: Scenic City is softball gem for recruiting

Taylor Harris is a still a year away from a regular roster spot on the Fury Fastpitch 16-under softball team. A rising sophomore at Girls Preparatory School, the catcher will spend most of this summer on the Fury’s 14-under squad.

But Saturday morning at Warner Park wasn’t an ordinary summer tourney. It was the Scenic City 16s event, which was promoted as “the country’s first exclusively 16U showcase tournament and skills combine.”

And just exactly what does that mean?

According to University of Tennessee co-head softball coach Ralph Weekly, who pretty much built the UT-Chattanooga program from scratch beginning 16 years ago, “A lot of kids will get scholarships out of this.”

That brings us back to why Harris was temporarily promoted from the Fury’s 14-under team to the 16s.

“A couple of SEC coaches wanted to see her,” said Pat Moyer, who co-founded the Fury organization with Jeremy Higdon three years ago. “So we used Taylor as a pinch-hitter. We brought several of our 14-under players up for this event, just to let them get a feel for this. College coaches are recruiting them young and younger these days.”

They’re recruiting them younger in every sport these days. Former Kentucky basketball coach Billy Gillispie stirred up controversy about this time last year when he accepted a commitment from an eighth-grader. It was rescinded a few weeks ago after John Calipari replaced Billy G.

But according to Moyer, men’s hoops coaches are recruiting AARPers compared to college softball coaches.

“They start evaluating some of them at 10, 11, 12 years old,” said Moyer, who has coached summer softball for 15 years. “They start tracking them and they’ll invite them to summer camps and Christmas camps from then on.”

Weekly says he and wife Karen (UT’s other co-coach) don’t start that young.

“We begin evaluating them in the ninth grade,” he said. “But we have already wrapped up our 2009 and 2010 classes. And we just got a commitment from a sophomore in California.”

To help this process, Moyer and Higdon brought the Scenic City 16s to Warner Park. Sixty teams signed on, including a few from as far away as Oklahoma and central Florida. More than 40 college programs were represented, including UT, South Carolina, Georgia, Georgia Tech and Kentucky.

Unlike a normal tourney, there is no champion crowned. Every team is guaranteed six games and the only hard and fast rules — players have been known to be removed, then re-entered for a college coach to watch them — is that the games must conclude in 80 minutes.

“We’re just trying to get as many players seen as possible,” Moyer said. “We don’t even turn on the scoreboards at the Frost Stadium games.”

To listen to Weekly, whose vision and tenacity helped build Frost, the five new fields that surround it are almost as big as reason to attend the Scenic City 16s as the players.

“I’ve told (UTC coach) Frank Reed that you’re sitting on a gold mine here,” Weekly said of Warner’s improvements. “There’s not a better softball complex anywhere. This is a tournament that’s going to grow.”

With college tuitions growing, you might think anxiety would soar among the girls vying for scholarships.

“I felt pressure,” said Stan Brooks, whose daughter Jackie Baird, a rising senior catcher at GPS, has committed to the Weeklys. “I know Jackie was more at ease than I was.”

Added Jackie’s mom Carla: “I feel awful today. I want to leave. It’s hard any time it’s your child out there.”

And their daughter already has locked up a scholarship.

Not that young Harris — whose father, Gerald, coaches the Tyner boys’ basketball team — seemed nervous on Saturday.

“I just think it’s fun,” she said. “It’s an honor. They’re giving you an opportunity against better competition. You’ve just got to step up to the plate.”

Perhaps that’s why Weekly labeled Chattanooga “the recruiting hotbed of Tennessee.”