September 5, 2017 - Jason Mitchell was the guest speaker at Tuesday's Center Rotary Club meeting today, September 5, 2017 at the John D. Windham Civic Center.
Mitchell is the City of Center Recreation Director and he spoke about the city's recreation programs saying right now soccer and football are going on. Football is actually going to draft tonight and soccer will draft on Thursday night, September 7th. He advised anybody wanting to participate in soccer can still sign up. They just need to contact Mitchell at 936-590-7196 as soon as possible.
"It looks like the football numbers are gonna be about where they were last year, " said Mitchell. "Center, Timpson, Tenaha, Garrison, and then we added Beckville in this year, are going to be in our football league."
"So, it ends up with a pretty big league. I'm gonna say it was roughly around 300 last year between the four towns that we had, that's minus Beckville. Soccer, we still have quite a few that haven't signed up that I'm still trying to get in touch with," continued Mitchell. "We'll draft this week, they will start playing about the 23rd of September. They'll run through the middle of November, as soon as that is over with, we will start signing up for basketball and basketball will start at the first of the year and it will run through when baseball and softball start. Basketball seems to be, last year alone, I think we were up about 20% in basketball."
Mitchell spoke about baseball and the tournaments which the city bids on every year. This year Dixie had an opening for an Assistant District State Director and Mitchell was offered the opportunity to fill that position and he agreed. The down fall of being the Assistant District State Director is he can no longer participate in the bidding process myself for the tournaments and someone else will have to fill that position.
In June and July of 2017 the city hosted six different weeks of tournaments. "The bids are so aggressive, everybody is wanting to get them," said Mitchell. "So, there was eight tournaments that I could actually bid on and I got five of the eight."
"Our t-ball team, 5 and 6 year old team, they were the only team to go to the World Series. This year they went to a Regional World Series. A Regional World Series consists of Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas - just those four states."
Mitchell explained, "[The Regional World Series] is on a four year rotation. This year, in 2018, it's going to be played in Texas. It could be played in Center, Texas. It's not against being played in Center, Texas. I know there's a lot of discussion that still needs to be made on whether or not that's the route that we want to go but there's definitely going to be some talk on whether or not that's something that we'd be interested in hosting." The last Regional World Series was held in Ruston, Louisiana.
