South African Youth Tournament

4/4/2007

The Citizen, a Johannesburg newspaper, has a brief article up about the South African Baseball Union’s interregional youth baseball tournament, which I will be leaving today to take an 18-hour bus ride to Cape Town, where I will be visiting developing baseball clubs in the city’s townships.

The article, which states that this is the first time SABU has ever been able to bring all the youth of the nation together in one place, is a little bit misleading. South African Baseball, about which I will have much more to write in the future, is split into the club system and the school system. Every December, SABU hosts a national schools tournament, which is where major league scouts first spotted last year’s only South African signee, Anthony Phillips (INF, Mariners). This tournament is held specifically for clubs, though as every single SABU official I interviewed over the last 2 days gleefully pointed out, 58% of the tournament’s 840 players came out of the nation’s school program. The excitement is with good reason, as the schools program is helping the nation develop the game of baseball faster than perhaps anywhere else in the world (with the possible exception of China).