“It’s unbelievable. I’ve been doing this 55 years, and this has got to be a first,” said Babe Glumack, Hibbing College’s softball coach. “I can’t even remember early March or April going out. I think before this in my career, it was like April 4th or April 5th. So we’re six weeks off, way ahead of time.”

“No, I’ve never seen it this early, ever. Not up north like this,” said Bob DeNucci, Hibbing College head baseball coach.

Disbelief filled the air on Sunday, as Hibbing College and Mesabi Range hit the turf for the first baseball game of the year in almost fifty degree weather in late February.

In the historic matchup for what many believe is the earliest baseball game played on the Range, it was Hibbing College who blanked Mesabi Range 13-0.

While the outcome of the game goes down as a loss for Mesabi Range, it was more about the experience for Chris Vito’s players.

“It was good to get out,” said Vito, Mesabi Range’s head coach. “We leave for Florida on Wednesday, so it’s to have these opportunities to get kids, to get a game under their belt, to see where they’re at as a team and what we’ve got to work on.”

The biggest difference of the day was the contrast of finally getting to play outside, a luxury compared to the inside practices and games that these teams are forced to have.

“When you’re indoors, you don’t have the running, you don’t have the hit and runs, you don’t have the strategy, said Glumack.

“It definitely gets frustrating when you get stuck indoors for too long,” said DeNucci. “You know, you got to go through the fundamentals and just keep beating on that stuff. But yeah, it can be tough when we get stuck indoors.”

“It’s not even comparable,” said Vito. “You know, our guys have done, I think, a really good job indoors working at it. But it gets old. It gets old and to have the opportunity to do what we need to do outside, you just can’t mimic the size, the space running on the field, seeing fly balls, ground balls, pitching. It is only so much you can do indoors.”

Typically, teams up north don’t get the opportunity to play outside until the later stages of spring. Not only was it good for players to be out there now, but for the future of these baseball programs.

“For recruiting purposes, college baseball starts early and earlier all the time. So for us to even be able to tell kids, ‘Hey, we played in February, like maybe it’s not so bad to come up here and play,'” concluded DeNucci.