The idea sprang from a casual conversation during an afternoon session of the 1992 state wrestling tournament inside Maclellan Gym.
As Merrill Eckstein, who was the Greater Chattanooga Sports and Events Committee president at the time, and former TSSAA executive director Ronnie Carter sat together, surveying the packed arena, Carter mentioned that he wished there could be similar support for the state competitions for spring sports. At that time, the state championship events for baseball, boys' soccer, softball, tennis and track and field were spread across Tennessee at different locations, and they typically drew only players' family members and maybe a handful of fans. Only softball came close to breaking even financially.
Eckstein, always looking for ways to bring revenue into the city through sports events, already had been tinkering with the idea of an Olympic-style event for the Southern Conference spring sports. But there had been pushback from some of the conference's athletic directors, so rather than pursue the idea as a college event, Eckstein recognized the state's high school sports governing body would be much more receptive.
"You could see the wheels turning in Merrill's mind as we talked," Carter said. "At that time we were already playing the softball state tournament at Warner Park, so we start discussing possible sites for the other sports. And the whole time you could see Merrill is sort of planning this thing.
"Our big issue was we couldn't think of a place that could host track. But then we spoke with Stacy Hill at GPS, and he informs us about their new facility, and all of a sudden this thing had real potential."
From that conversation, the Spring Fling was born.
Chattanooga easily won the bidding rights over Clarksville and Nashville to host the first event in 1994 and remained the spring sports destination for the first nine years of the TSSAA event. During that time the event helped turn those state tournaments from an afterthought to a bona fide multimillion dollar event.
"From a business side, we were looking at ways to increase the public's interest and the exposure for the athletes," Carter said. "For the kids, championships for those sports are just as big as football and basketball, so we wanted to create something special for them and also make it profitable for everyone.
"Chattanooga seemed like the perfect fit because the softball and wrestling tournaments had drawn large crowds and great media coverage there, so you knew there was huge interest in prep sports in and around Chattanooga. When we announced the idea, there was a sports writer from the Mid-State who told me we had lost our minds and that it was going to fail because nobody would cover it and nobody would come watch it.
"After that first year, I knew we were onto something. Chattanooga helped us create something that took the spring sports tournaments to a whole new level."
FAR FLUNG FLING
From that humble beginning, to go from simple idea to ideal setting, Chattanooga built the event into a production so lucrative - bringing in more than $2 million annually to the local economy - that other major cities began looking to lure it away.
And sure enough, much as the city did with the Southeastern Conference women's basketball tournament and the Division I-AA football national championship game, Chattanooga developed an event until it outgrew the Scenic City.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of Chattanooga's last time to host the Spring Fling. After three issue-plagued years in Memphis, the event eventually settled in Murfreesboro, which appears to have a firm grasp on future hosting rights.
Just two weeks after that 2002 Fling, the TSSAA Board of Control - starstruck by Memphis' more lucrative offer - voted to uproot the event and fling it to the state's westernmost city for the next three years.
"When the call came, I remember feeling great disappointment," Eckstein said recently. "I told everyone I spoke with at the time that Memphis had bought the event. They threw a much larger guarantee at the TSSAA than we could.
"We had created something very special, and anytime one of the events we hosted reached a point where the larger cities wanted to take it, we took that as a compliment for the job we had done in growing it."
Memphis dazzled the TSSAA with dollars, guaranteeing double the upfront financial bid to gain the right to host the event from 2003 to 2005. However, since Tennessee is such an elongated state - stretching more than 520 miles from Memphis to Johnson City in the northeastern corner - many fans did not make the trip west, and the Bluff City took a huge financial hit, losing nearly $200,000 in its three years as host, which caused the Memphis & Shelby County Sports Authority to shut down.
The event's short time in Memphis will be remembered best for its shortcomings. Besides the travel challenges - teams from upper East Tennessee that qualified could have made it through New York and across the Canadian border in the 11 hours it took to reach Memphis - several of the facilities that had been promised wound up not being usable.
Both of the sites for baseball's finals - AutoZone Park and USA Stadium - wound up having scheduling conflicts with other events, while softball was forced to move across the state line to be played in Southaven, Mississippi, because the original facility was not completed.
That marked the first time in 55 years that a Tennessee state championship was decided outside the state's borders.
"We took some hits, for obvious reasons, early on in Memphis," Carter said. "But once the games were played, the kids bailed us out and things actually improved the last couple of years there."
FINDING MIDDLE GROUND
Once the contract with Memphis ran out, Chattanooga's hopes of regaining the Spring Fling were dashed by another unbeatable foe. This time instead of finances, the combination of geographic advantage and better facilities were Murfreesboro's winning formula for securing hosting rights beginning in 2006.
Murfreesboro, which has also hosted the boys' and girls' basketball state tournaments flawlessly since 1989, has helped grow the Fling to the point that the city's chamber of commerce estimates it now hosts 4,200 athletes and more than 20,000 visitors during the weeklong event in late May, which accounts for around $5 million to the local economy.
Each of those numbers more than double the totals for Chattanooga during the early stages of the Fling.
"The Spring Fling is not the event it was when it began in Chattanooga," current TSSAA executive director Bernard Childress said. "In the beginning, Chattanooga was ahead of everybody, then Memphis offered more money and that was a major factor. Our history in Murfreesboro, with tournaments running smoothly and having good crowds, helped us make the decision to move it there.
"A lot of our folks had heard from coaches around the state who wanted to keep the championships as close to the middle of the state as possible, so if everything is equal, we prefer to stay in a centrally located area."
Two positive aspects that came from the move to Memphis were that it finally gave the western portion of the state a chance to host a state championship event, and because the larger city offered more facilities, it allowed the TSSAA to increase the number of baseball and softball teams that qualify for the state tournament from four to eight in each classification.
Beginning this school year, the TSSAA also expanded the number of public school classifications to four in baseball and softball, as well as boys' and girls' basketball. Adding an extra classification, on top of having doubled the bracket sizes for all classes, required more usable venues - Murfreesboro provides 15 host sites - and also meant more money made for the host city as well as the TSSAA.
Because of Murfreesboro's recent population boom, its surrounding high schools all have facilities that are newer and larger than any Chattanooga could offer.
"I had a lot of concerns when they voted to move it to Memphis, because I personally thought they couldn't meet the guarantees they had made, and it turned out they couldn't," said Eckstein, who admitted he never made the trip to Memphis to see the event there, but has been impressed when attending games in Murfreesboro. "It had some real problems when it went out there.
"It's more understandable why they made the next move after Memphis. With the facilities and having less travel for most of the schools, it just makes sense that they would settle into the middle of the state. I wouldn't be optimistic about it ever returning to Chattanooga."
Contact Stephen Hargis at shargis@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6293. Follow him on Twitter @StephenHargis.