By Steve Robinson | April 25, 2009 - 7:11 pm
Posted in Category: Personal Blog, Sports

BaseballNORMAL – Voter Fraud!, the headlines screamed. An unflattering nickname submission also found itself in the mix in trying to find a name for Normal’s new Independent baseball team.

So Steve Malliet and those who want to get baseball in Normal off on the right foot in 2010 has revamped both the names to be voted on and the voting procedure.

The team nicknames still include, Coal Bears, still honoring Comedy Central comic and “anchor” of “The Colbert Report”, but now Coal Bears is joined by the CamelBacks (a nod toward a local landmark, the Camelback Bridge); the CornBelters, and the Fellers, giving a nod toward Town history, naming the team after Jesse Fell, the man who founded Normal, help found Illinois State University, and the local daily newspaper, The Pantagraph.

Could Fellers also not be seen as in Normal Fellers, or Fellas who play the game? And, of course, the Nutz (tipping the cap toward Beer Nuts recognition.

The Nighthawks are gone, with the explanation that a nighthawk refers to a specific Ku Klux Klan officer. If memory serves, Unit 5 School District tripped over that little known fact when Normal Community West High School was looking for a mascot before it opened over a decade and a half ago.

Normal Professional BaseballIn the team being formed, Normal will have an Independent baseball franchise that will be associated with the Frontier League, which has teams stretching from Pennsylvania to Michigan to Missouri. They will play in the new baseball/softball complex at Heartland Community College. That complex is slated to open in 2010. The new Frontier League team’s season would run from April through Labor Day.

I will be searching frantically for the location of the news conference where the new team nickname will be announced. All I know right now is that that announcement will be made on May 18.

With the reboot in voting procedures, one now has to give a certain amount of required amount of information – your name, your address, your town and state, your zip code, your email address, and then you have to type in a required code number to verify that you only have voted once.

I kept waiting for a couple other items to be asked for, myself. You know, such things as your mother’s maiden name, your date of birth, or even your shoe size. The security did not go that far.

Let’s just hope that this restart will prove a positive and we can forget the unpleasantness of how this balloting started.

And again, after filling in all the blanks, I voted for the Camelbacks. We’ll let you know the results later this month.

Hoping For…: …A return to cover the National Junior Collegiate Athletic Association Division II Softball finals, which will be at Champion Fields again this year. I enjoyed covering them twice in the last three years, first for the Kalamazoo (MI) Gazette, covering Kalamazoo Valley Community College in 2005; and then again last year, giving coverage of the team from Copiah Lincoln Community College for the Brookhaven (Mississippi) Daily Leader.

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