It’s 10:44 p.m. on a Sunday night in the middle of July. Five picks remain in the second round of the MLB Draft. Pace’s Walter Ford has yet to be selected.

He went into the draft as the 53rd best prospect, which in the baseball world, doesn’t mean a thing.

Fans lined the railing along the walkway leading from the tunnel to the field on a rainy Tuesday night in early July at Blue Wahoos Stadium.

They had hats, bats, gloves, shirts and cards. Someone even had a plastic shovel.

I’ve never really been a big fan of all-conference, all-region or even all-state teams.

Don’t get me wrong. The recognition for the athletes is great and well-deserved. I have nothing against that part of it.

Hiring a coach can prove to be tricky times. Like trying to pick the right door to choose in one of those game shows.

But it’s safe to say Navarre and Milton got it right when it came to filling the voids they had for the position of head coach of the softball team.

As I walked around Beyer Stadium in my hometown of Rockford, Illinois, a couple of weeks ago, I thought about the Rockford Peaches and what it must have been like to play here in the era that they did here in this Northwest Illinois city.

They began playing in Rockford while America was still at war, and they continued to play here nearly a decade after World War II ended.

Athletes are supposed to be tough. No questions asked.

They are supposed to play through physical pain. And the mental pain they might be dealing with should never be an issue for them.

I came across a blank Father’s Day card the other day while cleaning off my desk at home.

I can’t tell you when I bought it or why it was never sent. Perhaps it was an extra card that I planned to send out for Father’s Day down the road.

In a little over a month, the Major League Baseball Draft will be underway.

It doesn’t quite bring the same hype, as the NFL Draft, but it’s still a big deal. A really big deal.

Back-to-back weeks of covering the state baseball and softball tournaments are in the rear-view mirror, and it seems now I finally have a moment to breathe with the official high school sports season wrapped up until the fall.

Pace’s baseball and softball teams both played at state, but neither was able to come away with a championship.

A lot of people point to how important the rules are until those rules are no longer important because they aren’t convenient.

If the FHSAA is going to have a rule that a player ejected from a game must sit out at least the next two, then there shouldn’t be any doorway that can be opened to change it.