Road Trip!

This is Brentt Eads of Line Drive Softball…

Yesterday, my wife Shannon and I went on a loooooong road trip that started in Bonham, Texas (in the Dallas area) to Fort Collins, Col., the site of the 2025 P5 Patriot Games, which started today and runs through Saturday.

Our nearly 13-hour drive forced us to fill our car three times with gas – but it was cool to drive through cities like Dallas and then later ones which were about a half mile long as the freeway cut through them.

One of particular interest to me was “Eads, Colorado,” which was built in 1887 as a railroad town and was named after James Buchanan Eads, a structural engineer with the Missouri Pacific Railroad who was famous for constructing the “Eads Bridge” over the Mississippi River in 1874.

So how big is the city that shares my last name? Just 306 acres and with a population of under 700 folks!

We drove on and hit a heavy, heavy thunderstorm that pelted us as we drove through Denver before we safely made it to our hotel in Fort Collins and retired early to get some rest before hitting the first day of action at the 2025 version of The Patriot Games.

*****

The Patriot Games – Day 1 (Thursday)

The elevation isn’t the only thing climbing in Fort Collins, Colorado—sitting 5,003 feet above sea level.

As one club coach put it regarding The Patriot Games:

“It’s one of the best events over the summer because the competition is so good and it gives us a chance to see how we stack up with the best there is in the country.”

The invite-only showcase includes two pristine fields at Triple Crown Sports’ collegiate-sized headquarters as part of four satellite parks that feature elite 18U, 16U and 14U softball and high-value recruiting opportunities.

Today was Day 1 of three straight days of fastpitch games going 8 am-to-8 pm and also provides each of the teams the opportunity to have two hours inside the new College Sports Evaluation performance lab at the Triple Crown Sports headquarters.

There we watched TCS head Dave King demonstrate what the performance lab can do to a variety of coaches and players and came across numerous softball standouts I’ve followed since their club days including Ashley Rogers (Tennessee), Nicole Mendez (Oklahoma) and Vanessa Shippy (Oklahoma State), to name a few.

Speaking of name-dropping, just at the early afternoon games at the two fields located at the Triple Crown HQ, we saw Power 5 head coaches like Karen Weekly on-site recruiting and other softball coaches from schools ranging from Arizona State to Utah and a dozen in-between including Florida, Kentucky, Texas Tech and Utah to name just a few that I talked with.

Others scheduled to be at the four venues today through Saturday’s wrap-up include (you may want to sit down for this list as it’s impressively lengthy):

Appalachian State, Abilene Christian, Alabama, Army West Point, Auburn, Baylor, Boise State, Boston College, Brown, BYU, Cal State Fullerton, Clemson, Colorado State, Columbia, Dartmouth, Florida, Florida State, Fresno State, Harvard, Idaho State, Iowa State, Kansas, Lindenwood, Louisiana Tech, Louisiana-Lafayette, Marshall, Maryland Eastern Shore, Miami (OH), Oklahoma State, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, Nebraska Omaha, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Texas, Northern Colorado, Notre Dame, Oklahoma, Portland State, Rider, South Dakota State, Southern Illinois, Southern Utah, Stanford, Tennessee, Texas, Texas-Arlington, Texas A&M, Texas State, Troy, UCLA, UNLV, UTEP, Villanova, Virginia, Western Michigan, Wichita State, and Yale.

… to name a few (dozen).

A great kick-off to one of the premier summer club ball tournaments…

… and here’s a fun montage of images we assembled today (huge thanks to Shannon for putting together the video piece)…