All Class State Baseball Kicking Off in Hamilton Thursday

We've had great Legion baseball in Montana for years, but this is really the first BIG year for Montana high schools to have their own baseball programs now that the sport is in its third year.

We had a great chat with our producer (and umpire) Caden Bjornstad along with Scott Wilson from the Montana High School Association looking at this quickly expanding high school sport in Montana on Wednesday morning. All this, as the All Class State Baseball Tournament kicks off Thursday in Hamilton. Columbia Falls, Billings Central, Billings West, Frenchtown, Billings Skyview, Hamilton, Missoula Big Sky, and Belgrade are all competing on day one of the tournament. (Full audio is in the podcast below)

This year, 35 schools have now participated in high school baseball, with more coming online in the 2025-2026 school year.

Scott Wilson says the biggest challenge is school funding. "Probably our next biggest challenge that the schools have had to face is the actual field time and field space. You know, a lot of districts don't have a baseball facility on their school property, so they're using- renting out city parks, renting with their local Legion teams, things like that."

Caden asked a great challenge about how the wacky Spring weather impacts high school baseball, which led to what I thought was an interesting response about how scheduling baseball games can be more challenging than scheduling softball games.

Scott Wilson: "If you reschedule a softball game that was supposed to be, let's say on Tuesday- you can probably say, hey, let's play it tomorrow, you know, the next day, Wednesday, even though I know we have a game Thursday and possibly Friday. With baseball, the schools have to keep in mind when they reschedule is- do they have enough pitchers that can keep up with or the rules on pitch count. And so that is one of the big challenges that schools have to face with the reschedule. And then also as we grow as a sport with this number of schools, we're also- each year we've added the number of umpires and and also having umpire availability."

Here's the bracket from the MHSA website:

The audio of our conversation with MHSA is in the 2nd half of the below podcast: