GULF SHORES — For the 24th consecutive year, baseball and softball teams from neighboring states are spending their spring breaks on the Baldwin County coast to get their seasons started at Gulf Coast Classic Tournaments.

The first week was capped by Tuscaloosa County and Tennessee’s Lipscomb Academy being crowned champions out of 48 softball teams on Wednesday and 51 baseball teams on Thursday, respectively.

Created by former Gulf Shores head baseball coach Donnie Spohn, the spring break event has grown from a five-team event into three weeks of baseball and softball tournaments that all feature anywhere from 40 to 70 teams. But according to current Dolphin head baseball coach Chris Jacks, what sets the Gulf Coast Classic apart is the hardware awarded to the champion and runner-up of each week.

“There's not a lot of tournaments that give out trophies anymore. It's hard because we only get four teams to play in it out of 51 some-odd teams,” Jacks said on Thursday at the championship game of the first baseball tournament. “It's a unique tournament and there's not a lot of tournaments like it in the country. There's a lot of teams that love coming, and I could have probably had 85 teams in the third tournament, I just ran out of field space and had to had to cut it down.”

More hosts, more problems? Not for this machine.

All the softball games are hosted at the Gulf Shores Sportsplex but the baseball contests are spread out around the county. It’s partially Jacks’ job to coordinate the chaos, but he said it's a well-oiled machine after nearly two and a half decades.

“Donnie Spohn started this thing 24 years ago, it started small kind of only here and Robertsdale then slowly has built into what it is now,” Jacks said. “When I first got here (in 2017), the biggest tournaments were right at 40 teams. Now, all of these seem to be around there with our biggest creeping over 70.”

The first week of baseball featured games played in Gulf Shores, Orange Beach, Robertsdale, Elberta, Fairhope, Spanish Fort and Daphne’s Bayside Academy. More familiar ballparks are set to host games in the next two weeks, including Foley and Coastal Alabama-South, but Jacks said he works closest with Robertsdale’s Peter Bezeredi and Orange Beach’s Josh Hoyle.

“Bezeredi does a lot of the scheduling and I do a lot of checking and Josh helps out with that as well. Us three are probably the most involved in it,” Jacks said. “Me and Bez do the majority of the communicating with the host sites and I do the majority of the emailing and communicating with the coaches, making sure we're all on the same page with selling tickets and just being consistent in the product that we put out.”

Tough to beat the atmosphere, Jacks says

That product is a highly competitive high school tournament which felt quite different than Gulf Shores’ experience at the Perfect Game Showdown in Hoover just a couple of weeks ago where Jacks felt more of a summer travel ball vibe.

“When you come here, it's a high school atmosphere: you've got good dugouts, you get music going, we don't do the PA system but it feels like high school baseball,” Jacks said. “Being on both sides of the fence and playing in both ones, in my opinion, this is a better high school tournament; a lot because of that atmosphere and the feeling behind it.”

Not many tournaments have trophies up for grabs

The opportunity to play for hardware at the end of the week also certainly doesn’t hurt. Jacks said the championship and runner-up trophies have added another layer of competition to the already intense week.

“You have to go 4-0, usually you cannot give up a lot of runs but it's six games in four days and we get a champion. Somebody gets to take a little hardware home and gets to blast it all over their social media that out of 51 teams they were one of the top four to get to play on Thursday,” Jacks said. “There's not a lot of tournaments that you get that feel of win or go home. (Week 1 finalists Fairhope and Lipscomb Academy got) that, these guys got to play all day today; just like a playoff series if you win two, you keep playing.”

State championship trophies will soon be on the line

While the Gulf Coast Classic will continue to take over Baldwin County diamonds for the next two weeks, the playoffs are rapidly approaching. With the Dolphins’ season opener only a month behind them, the first round of the postseason sat just one month away from this Sunday, March 17, with the state championship series set for three weeks later.

“How fast it goes, high school baseball just flies by,” Jacks said on Thursday. “We've played 20 games in a month; we opened up one month ago today. (It feels like we've just started) but we'll be one month away from the first round of playoffs this Sunday. It goes fast.”