Boys of summer swing for Morgan!

America’s summer pastime–baseball–is alive and going strong in Morgan with The Utah Summer Baseball league high school-age team.  Jed Stuart, who also leads the Morgan High Baseball team, coaches the varsity and sub-varsity teams that have been playing since the end of May and will continue through the middle of July.

“After the challenging spring we had weather-wise and not really being able to practice very much at all,” Coach Stuart shared, “it has been great to get games and practice time in this summer.  We have a young team, and the practice time is very valuable.”

“Our summer season is going really well, even if our results don’t always show it.”

Morgan’s team consists of four rising seniors, four rising juniors and eight incoming sophomores.  No rising freshmen are playing on the team this year.  The league doesn’t allow players who recently graduated to play and focuses on helping teams develop talent for next year’s spring season.

“This league is really helpful to get good practice time and good games in,” Stuart explained.  “Our program doesn’t have a lot of feeders, and we don’t have a lot of boys who play ‘comp’ or ‘travel’ baseball, so this experience is very important to our program.  We have a lot of rising sophomores who are playing a lot of varsity ball.”

The league has a North and South division and is made up of teams representing high schools, but the teams are not official high school teams.  Morgan is part of the North Division along with Bonneville, Bountiful, Clearfield, Fremont, Grantsville, Green Canyon, Highland, Northridge, Ogden, Roy, Skyline, Stansbury, Syracuse, Tooele, Weber and West Jordan.  

“Currently our varsity team is 1-6-2 and our subvarsity team is 4-4-1.  We are gaining a lot of experience this summer, and most of our athletes play both games. We have pretty solid pitching on the team.  We’ve got quite a few kids who throw the ball well,” Stuart reported.

The Summer Baseball League has a time limit on games, and it has led to three tie games.  Coach Stuart remarked, “The time limit stuff is tough.  I don’t like to end it with a tie.”

Stuart, a 1995 Morgan High graduate, has been coaching the high school team for the last five years.  He enjoys coaching, especially since he’s been able to coach his sons, Chase, Jarren and Cooper. “It’s a full-time commitment to build a program,” he detailed.  “If I didn’t enjoy it, I wouldn’t do it.”  Stuart has a number of assistants who help mentor and instruct the players:  Tom Rhoades, Justin Bauerle, Jason Venz and Jason Talbot.  

Morgan hosted Bountiful Monday, July 10 and Fremont Thursday, July 13 in their last regular season games of the summer.  

For any boy interested in playing on the fall travel baseball team, please contact Coach Jed Stuart through Morgan High.  The team is open to all high school age boys and will start at the end of August.  “We’d love to get any athletes out who are interested in baseball,”  he encouraged.  “We try to keep the kids busy playing and keep them out of trouble.  Off-season practice really helps build for the spring season.”λ