Omaha – Diamonds Are Forever

I love baseball! My mom taught me how to keep score when I was young, because she’d always done it for the teams my grandpa coached. My brother pitched, and I went to just about every game all the way through high school. So, I was thrilled that two of my good college friends were from Omaha, Nebraska—home of the College World Series.

The CWS is just a great event! The streets are lined with clever t-shirt tents that have that year’s line-ups in a hundred different designs, and the parking lot is full of college fan tents and vans with window-painted cheers. If you have never experienced the true blue, die-hard raucous college sports environment, you should! It’s the best combination of skill, fandom and pure “for the love of the game-ness.”

But the best part of the CWS was its legendary stadium. Rosenblatt. It was big enough to give the feel of minor league play (sometimes better!), but small enough that you didn’t miss a moment of the game. The crowds were always wild with cheering energy. Bouncing beachballs and the Wave were staples. And the stadium shared a parking lot with Omaha’s amazing zoo, so if you got there early to find good parking, you could check out the lions and gorillas before the stadium opened.

I went to the CWS three times. The last time was bittersweet…it was the last year of Rosenblatt Stadium.

They tore it down to make more parking for the zoo and to build a new, beautiful stadium closer to downtown.

But nothing will replace Rosenblatt.