Braun Park buzzes with tournament play

Braun Park was the hub of softball in northern Minnesota over this past weekend with the USSSA Northern State Softball Championships. The complex will continue to be a mecca for ball when a massive baseball tournament takes place next weekend, July 26-28, with a smaller coach-pitch tournament this weekend.

"No doubt we have been busy this summer," said Cloquet Youth Baseball and Softball Association president Jason Eckenberg. "The ballfields have been redone and the park is just beautiful. The softball tournament went off without a hitch last weekend."

The USSSA, the United States Specialty Sports Association, hired local softball guru Jeff Woollett to be the tournament director this year. Woollett, a former CYSBA president, has been running tournaments for the past 25 years and said the fact that Braun Park hosts the tournament each year is a feather in the cap for Cloquet.

"The fact that they keep coming back to our complex says that we are doing a good job for them," explained Woollett. "It got a little hot on Sunday, but other than that it was good weather for a softball tournament, with no weather delays for rain or anything like that."

A total of 32 teams hit the field on Saturday in the U-10, U-12, U-14 and a high school open division featuring players ages 16 and up.

The winner of the U-10 title was Hermantown Pink. The U-12 Gold Division saw Grand Rapids beat Bemidji in the championship game and the Silver Division winner was Hermantown Blue which beat Hermantown Purple. The U-14 Gold championship went to the Red Corvettes out of Moose Lake, which downed the Minnesota Blast 13s; the Silver championship went to Bemidji which beat Duluth CMC Lightning in the championship game. The Cloquet-based Minnesota Blast 16s team beat Proctor 1-0 to win the high school Open Division title, while the Minnesota Blast U-15 team won the Silver Division over 218 Intensity of Cloquet.

The crowds were big, and a strong contingent of fans cheering on their teams brought an electric atmosphere to the complex over the course of the two-day event.

"It's a lot of work for our grounds crew, but we have a good group of workers who do a good job," Woollett said. "We really have only four people handling all the fields, and over the course of the tournament they handled it well, and the fields stood up nicely over the tournament and we had no problems."

This year the CYBSA, which runs Braun Park, has put in a lot of overtime and extra work in making sure the facility got a facelift prior to the high school softball playoffs this spring and tournaments this summer. New scoreboards were delivered days before the sectional softball tournaments, and the fields were shaved down and given a facelift of their own.

"We did a lot of work in the spring to get the park where it should be," Eckenberg said. "We called the project "Brighten Braun" and we tried to get local businesses more involved in the park through hanging new banners to get some color out on the fences to brighten things up. We had Kiminski Paving come in and regrade all of our fields back to level and got our fields back to where they should be. It was somewhat overdue, but it looks great now."

As busy as Braun was last weekend, in two weekends things will get even crazier as Cloquet will be hosting 67 baseball teams, from the U-9 to U-14 age levels. The tournament will use seven of the eight fields at the Braun Complex as well as two fields in Carlton and three fields at the Buffalo House sports complex.

"We do need people to help volunteer for the boys baseball tournament coming up," Woollett suggested. "We will have 90 games over a three-day period so there is no question we need the help."

Those interested in helping can contact the CYBSA via email at [email protected].