GRAND JUNCTION — The baseball gods smile kindly upon Suplizio Field every Memorial Day Weekend.
Each year, 10 junior college baseball teams from across the country make the pilgrimage to the largest city in western Colorado for the right to compete for a national title in the NJCAA Division I Junior College World Series.
Grand Junction has been home to JUCO, as itap simply known by locals and junior college ball clubs, since 1959. The tournament has not only energized the city of nearly 72,000 people in the six decades since its arrival, but also much of Mesa County and the baseball community on Colorado’s Western Slope.
Teams from across the U.S. battle through 60-game seasons for the right to play in Grand Junction. Those teams then duke it out in a week-long, double-elimination tournament until one is left standing on the final weekend of May.
Itap not some folksy, podunk event. The fireworks game on Memorial Day usually fills or nearly fills the 10,000-seat stadium. The tournament also draws top-end talent. What Omaha’s College World Series is to four-year Division I schools, Grand Junction is to the JUCO world.
Kirby Puckett, the namesake for the tournamentap MVP award,. in the late 1990s. Bryce Harper starred for the College of Southern Nevada in 2010 before being drafted No. 1 overall by the Washington Nationals in the MLB draft. And, in 2022, Milwaukee Brewers’ budding ace pitcher Jacob Misiorowski touched triple digits on the radar gun in a hail-delayed win for Missouri’s Crowder College. On Thursday, ESPN’s Jeff Passan called the JUCO World Series “the purest form of baseball” that he’s seen in ages.
Dusty Hart, the head coach of Blinn College in Texas, one of this year’s finalists, is well-acquainted with the tournament. He played for Texas’ Grayson College in the 1998 JUCO tournament and coached Grayson back to the tournament. He guided Blinn to the 2024 national championship.
“Itap incredible. We’ll go eat lunch in the afternoon, and there’s 10 kids trying to get you to sign their Chick-fil-A bags at lunch,” Hart said. “I’ve had players that have played in Omaha after they played in Grand Junction. And they tell me, man, Omaha is awesome, but Grand Junction is right up there with it.”
This year’s field featured Blinn, Harford Community College (Maryland), Johnson County Community College (Kansas), Louisiana State University Eunice, Midland College (Texas), Miami Dade College (Florida), Salt Lake Community College (Utah), Seminole State College (Oklahoma), Wabash Valley College (Illinois) and Walters State Community College (Tennessee).
As of Friday, Blinn and Johnson County are the last two teams standing.
Grand Junction’s pastime
The first JUCO World Series was played in 1958 in Miami, Oklahoma. As the story goes, attendance was weak, the weather was bad, and the tournament experience was just lacking. So, JUCO moved to Grand Junction in 1959. Then-Mesa College earned auto bids early on as the hosts, though it eventually had to earn its way into the tournament. In all, Mesa made 13 JUCO tournaments before transitioning to a four-year school.
The Grand Junction Baseball Committee, also known as the JUCO Committee, had a series of short-term contracts with the NJCAA to host the tournament. It had to continually bid on those deals to keep the tournament in town. In 2010, the committee secured a 25-year contract with the NJCAA with the promise that it would construct a tower for special seating and a press box, and more seating in the stadium. That contract has since been extended, so .
JUCO is played at Suplizio Field, which also hosts independent baseball and high school baseball. Suplizio shares a facility with Ralph Stocker Stadium, a football stadium that also hosts track meets.
“The $10 million upgrade to the tower over there was done because of grants, income from the sales of tickets here, and getting people to contribute to it without having a tax increase in the facility, ” said Jamie Hamilton, who was the chairman of the JUCO Committee from 2003-2024 and first volunteered with the tournament in 1986. “People own this facility. High school players get to play in this facility. The community gets to walk on the football field and the track.”
Hamilton was born in Grand Junction, raised in Arvada, won a state baseball title with Regis Jesuit High School, played for Mesa State College and for the then-California Angels in their minor league system before returning to Grand Junction and helping out with JUCO.
Patti Arnold, a longtime Grand Junction sportswriter and JUCO volunteer who died last year, wrote in a 2017 book on the tournament that fans would camp in front of Suplizio Field the night before the first JUCO game, before seating was expanded at the stadium. She also wrote that, when putting together a special JUCO section for the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel, coaches “bent over backwards” to help out when they heard “Grand Junction.”
Once the 10-team field is set and everyone arrives, the fun begins. Players and kids participate in a baseball clinic, and some teams get to play Challenger Baseball with kids who have physical or mental disabilities. Each team and some community members then attend a banquet the night before the first day of games to honor the latest inductees into the NJCAA Hall of Fame. The likes of Tony La Russa and Drew Goodman have delivered the keynote speech at the JUCO Banquet.
For Darren Coltrinari, the current JUCO committee chairman, the annual tournament is about community and tradition.
“You sit through a nine-inning game that could be two-and-a-half hours, it could be four-and-a-half hours. In baseball, less now, but there is dead time and a lot of the time, you’re sitting there talking,” said Coltrinari, who graduated from Grand Junction Central High School and played baseball at New Mexico. He’s also Hamilton’s godson. “You’re reviewing the last pitch, you’re talking about what you’re doing tomorrow, things like that. There’s a social aspect to baseball.”
Coltrinari added: “Our goal as a community is to make this the best tournament possible.”
That effort comes through partnerships with local partners — the school district, business community, government, media outlets and about 83 volunteers. The regulars’ hearts are heavy this year following the deaths of longtime volunteers Arnold, the former sportswriter, and Greg Hazelhurst.
“Losing both of them was hard because they’re really the anchors; they’re really the rocks of everything that goes on up here,” said Jermaine Williams, who helps run media operations for JUCO. “(Saturday morning) was tough to not have them here. Obviously, we will continue to move on and do what we need to do. But both of them just meant a lot … I wish we had taken the time to hug them one more time.”
Thousands of people pack the stands for the first weekend of games. Chatter echoes through the ballpark, only to be interrupted by the smack of an aluminum bat, cheers and a foghorn sound effect after a player hits a home run. Sometimes, you’ll even hear the ball thumping off a car in the parking lot beyond center field.
Each team has a deck of baseball cards for sale. Local food vendors line the concourse, serving up foot-long corn dogs out of a 20-foot red tent, ice cream, or kettle corn, to name a few. No alcohol is served at the games, keeping in line with the family-friendly atmosphere.
Williams has been involved with JUCO since 2009. He once worked in athletics for Colorado Mesa University and is now an assistant athletics director at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. He and his family — wife Shayla, daughter Emma, and son Jaxon — still make the 1,600-mile trip every year for JUCO.
Williams has worked in athletics at five universities. While he hasn’t been to Omaha, he thinks itap hard to compare many college sports events to JUCO.
“The big events that I’ve been a part of are events that drop into a city, they’re there for four days and then they move on to the next city. The NCAA Regional or a Final Four or something like that,” Williams said. “The difference for me is just the homegrown feel of this event. Itap been here for (67) years, and you’ve got people who grew up watching JUCO baseball that are now helping. You got families, kind of like ours, that are either in the Grand Valley or on the Front Range or anywhere in the country, and they come back for this week.
“And I think thatap what makes it special.”
‘This was my big leagues’
Hunter Smolinski, the lead-off second baseman for Blinn, is from nearby Fruita.
Smolinski played for Division I Grand Canyon last season and was there until last fall, when it seemed unlikely he’d be an everyday player, he said. So, Smolinski got in touch with Hart, the Blinn coach, and got a spot on the Buccaneers’ roster.
Smolinski is one of three Colorado kids who played in this year’s tournament. The others were Erie’s Holden Pantier (Walters State) and Montrose’s Gage Wareham (Salt Lake).
When he was growing up, Smolinski’s parents would drop him off at the stadium for the morning game. He’d meet his friends there — they, too, dropped off by their parents, he said — and they’d spend all day hanging out at the stadium and watching baseball.
“There’s no money, no nothing involved in this. This is just straight passion for the game,” said Smolinski, who was hitting .500 with a 1.245 OPS on 20 at-bats as of Thursday.
Smolinski added that he thinks that mindset is clear to Grand Junction fans.
“I think thatap the reason you see so many people coming out to watch these games,” he said.
Most of the schools that make it to JUCO come from areas of just a few dozen thousand people. And even those from larger areas — Miami Dade and Salt Lake, for example — are far from the main event in their communities.
And because many of these JUCO players won’t reach Omaha, let alone the majors, JUCO is their time to have that big-league attention.
Many JUCO teams don’t report their game attendance. Generally, though, those games are lucky to have 100 folks in the stands. Playing in the nightcap fireworks game on Memorial Day, Johnson County and Walters State drew a crowd of more than 11,000 people.
Hartap Buccaneers are on the precipice of another championship. His kids are in the midst of a week they’ll probably remember for a long time. Itap been 30 years since Hart played in JUCO and he can still recall that experience.
Hart hit leadoff for Grayson in 1998. In his team’s second game, sent the first pitch he saw into Suplizio’s left-field bleachers.
“Thatap literally my best memory as a player … I don’t even remember going around the bases. Itap just such a surreal moment,” said Hart, who admitted he probably played in front of bigger crowds later on in his career, “but never in a World Series type environment … This was my big leagues.”
