Shawnee police remove youth baseball team from 3&2 after alleged quarantine violation

Youth baseball has returned to the Kansas City metro amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and that provided a flash point involving police at a Shawnee sports complex Friday.

Shawnee police were summoned to remove a Competitive Edge youth-league team from the 3&2 West Complex facility after its players were deemed ineligible to compete after allegedly violating quarantine orders and refusing to leave the property.

Midwest Sports Productions is hosting the event jointly with KC Youth Baseball Tournaments and 3&2 Baseball Clubs; a member of Midwest Sports was told the team in question had played in Alabama in the last 14 days.

The Kansas Department of Health and Environment has mandated that Kansas City residents and those visiting Kansas who have traveled to Alabama must quarantine for 14 days upon arrival in Kansas. Jeff Chalk, 3&2 Baseball’s executive director, said officials on hand looked up the tournament in Alabama and found reason to believe the team had played there within the 14-day window.

“We’re doing our best to follow the rules as laid out by the state of Kansas,” Chalk said.

Management at 3&2, one of five sites playing host to the Under Armour Championship Series featuring teams from across the region, asked the team to leave before its first game at noon Friday. When the team’s coaches refused to leave the tournament, Chalk said, management at the complex asked police to step in.

According to Shawnee Police spokesman Maj. Jim Baker, no incident report was taken at the complex. But once someone is asked to leave such a property by an authority figure and refuses, he said, it is deemed trespassing.

Standard procedure for 3&2 is to sanitize dugouts and bleachers between games. The team that was removed from the complex Friday had occupied a dugout, Chalk said, so staff cleaned that area and play resumed on that field two hours later. The 3&2 West complex features a number of fields and hosts multiple games at once.

According to the KDHE website, the state’s quarantine or isolation order applies to five states: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida and South Carolina.

KDHE uses a formula to evaluate new cases in states across the country and compare them to the current number of cases in Kansas. If the COVID-19 rate in another state is approximately three times higher than the present rate in Kansas, that state gets added to the KDHE list.

The Under Armour Championships continue at 3&2 Saturday and Sunday.

This story was originally published July 10, 2020 at 5:37 PM.