Shorts fading from softball scene

By McCall MeadeFORT DODGE -- Let's go back five years ago to the state softball tournament and see what the uniforms looked like, more importantly what the bottoms of the uniforms looked like.Shorts were clearly dominated in the tournament and were worn mainly all around the state. Return to the present, and pants are the leading choice of bottoms for most teams.It's very unlikely to see a team that still wears shorts now, but a few still continue to wear shorts. At the state tournament, six teams (of 40) still wear shorts to compete in.Mid- Prairie and Clear Creek Amana are both teams that continue to wear shorts, but do have pants that they will also wear. CCA in fact will wear their pants as most baseball players do, down to the ankles.Most players complain that shorts make it easier to get an infamous “strawberry” when they slide or dive on the field. Wearing pants makes cuts and scrapes less likely to happen and starts the early extinction of sliding pads.Maddie Bohr, a junior from Washington, prefers pants over shorts because “I don't have to worry about getting sliding burns, and they make you look like a ball player.”Thirty-three other teams in the tournament agree or have similar thoughts to Bohr and Washington on wearing pants.The issue of the style of some of the uniforms at the state tournament is another story, but we'll keep it short and stick to the pants dominating the shorts.