Update 10-18-2024
Coming Monday…World Series, The Lost story of the Western Arkansas League from 100 years ago, and Hank, Willie, and Ernie come to Little Rock
In Case You Missed It:
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Western Arkansas League
Below you will find a link to the beginning of the lost story of the Western Arkansas League, a bold experiement that brought professional baseball to the small towns in the Arkansas River Valley. Part II of this obscure minor league will run Monday. If you missed Part I, you can catch up at this link.
Western Arkansas League Part I
Leave it to the Beavers:
Do you know the story of the Village Academy Beavers? If not, you can find it linked below from a story on Channel 11 this week. It is a story of the unvelievable ruse created by two of our subscribers, Bob Sivils and Gary Crowder.
As younger and more adventursome young collegues, Bob and Gary wondred if anyone who recieved the Friday night high school football scores really knew anything about the schools who called in those scores or the geography of Arkansas.
To test the hypothesis, they called in the score of the Friday night game beween ficticious Village Academy and another invented school. When the score of the make-believe game ran the next day in the Little Rock paper, the Villiage Academy Beavers had made the sports page.
The Beavers will always be a special team to me. My two sons played on one of the teams that opposed the academy. That was pretty amazing since one was nine and the other was five.
You will love this story.
In case you missed this story on Channel 11, you can find it below:
Link to the story of the Village Academy Beavers
More on the Beavers in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas written by Rex Nelson
Many years ago, I worked at the KC Star as one of the stats crew on the sports desk, and I can see how the Village Academy prank would have worked. Anybody could have called me up and given a score for a fake school (especially on the Missouri side of the state line) and I probably would have bought it. What a great idea those guys had!