Opening Day
Enquirer Photo: Clif Knight. Magen Smith leaves third base en route to home with Sassy Sluggers’ first run of the season. Her coach is Michael Murphy.
70 teams kick off season
Hartselle’s Dixie Youth Baseball and Girls Softball League, featuring more than 70 teams and about 1,000 players, opened its season with a full day of exhibition games on Saturday.
Wet fields delayed the opening on Friday evening.
The Dixie Softball League is broken down into five age divisions. The Sweeties (ages 5-6) and the Darlings (ages 7-8) each consists of seven teams; The Angels (ages 9-10) have six teams; the Belles (ages 13-15) have four teams; and the Ponytails (ages 11-12) have three teams and will play with teams from Decatur.
“We have about the same number of players this year as what we’ve had over the past two or three years,” said League President Kevin Holder. “The difference is we have one fewer team in Ponytails. That’s because we have several 11- and 12-year-old players who are playing on travel teams. In order to facilitate the scheduling of games we decided to combine our three teams with those in Decatur and play half of the games here and the other half in Decatur.”
Dixie Youth Baseball is broken down into six divisions, including T-ball, ages 5-6, ages 7-8, ages 9-10, ages 11-12 and ages 13-14. Of those, the 7-and 8-year olds have the most players and teams with 14 teams playing in three divisions.
Enquirer Photo: Brent Maze. Braxton Quattlebaum of the 5- and 6-year-old Red Sox steps on the bag for an out as Aiden Holliday of the Rangers slides into first base.
