Youth select baseball is topic of spring's final Olson Seminar

Appropriately, the spring's final Paul A. Olson Seminar in Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln will deal with baseball.

In his April 8 seminar, "Youth Select Baseball in the Midwest: The Shape of Things to Come," David Ogden, associate professor in the School of Communications at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, will discuss how adolescent and teenage boys who are serious about playing competitive baseball don't see city recreational baseball as the best opportunity for advancing to higher levels of competition.

Ogden will describe how these youngsters and their parents, along with many coaches and officials, consider select or traveling team baseball as a better avenue for honing skills and matching those skills against the best players in a given age group. As a result, the number of Midwestern select tams that registered with the United States Sport Specialty Association in 2008 has doubled and even tripled in most 8- to 18-year-old age brackets since 2001 and those teams have served as feeders for local high school and American Legion programs.

The evidence, Ogden said, indicates that select baseball serves as a "grooming" period for college baseball players. In his study of nearly 500 college baseball players, he found that for the vast majority, select baseball served as an important development period.

Ogden's seminar will be 3:30 to 5 p.m. in the Great Plains Art Museum, 1155 Q St. The seminar and a 3 p.m. reception in the museum are free and open to the public.