Scott Smith

Mark July 13 on your calendars. That's the day Chattanooga attempts to regain custody of the baby it birthed 15 years ago before a bunch of charlatans from Memphis stole her away.

We're speaking of the Spring Fling, which could bring as much as $5 million to our town in May 2010 if the TSSAA sees fit to return to us the child we nurtured for nine fine years, 1994 to 2002.

We probably would have kept her past then, too, if the Bluff City (emphasis on "bluff") hadn't promised everything but Elvis singing the national anthem from his grave to get the high school spring sports spectacular.

(By the way, we're still waiting for Justin Timberlake to perform and those Memphis Grizzlies NBA tickets for the athletes, both of which were used as bait in the bidding process.)

Of course, the state's elite softball teams would have settled for scorekeepers who had seen a scorebook before, but perhaps that was expecting too much.

Point is, after building the Fling into an event that every city in the state wanted, we lost it to a con artist.

But did the TSSAA return our child to its hometown after three difficult years in West Tennessee? Noooooooooooo. It sent it to Murfreesboro and the outstanding athletic facilities at Middle Tennessee State.

But after four years there -- and Murfreesboro may indeed be the perfect spot for it -- the TSSAA again is listening to alternatives, as it should after four years.

"I've talked to Scott (Smith, head of the Greater Chattanooga Sports and Events Committee)," TSSAA executive director Bernard Childress said last week. "I think his chief concern is baseball. But I think it's wide open. Of course, we've been happy with Murfreesboro. But I don't think any one city has an upper hand just because we've had the Fling there before."

We've had lots of things here before. The SEC women's basketball tournament. NCAA women's basketball regionals. The Southern Conference softball tourney. The SoCon basketball tourney. Professional golf tournaments. The NCAA Division I football championship game. The Fling.

Other than the football title game, however, we've never been particularly good at holding onto any of them, though the SoCon tourneys do drop in now and then.

Smith hopes to change all that in two weeks, however.

"The Fling is important for several reasons," he said. "For one, the economic impact. Second, we want to get the TSSAA back in Chattanooga. We'd love to take every championship they have, but since the Fling started here, it will always be special to us."

Childress was a member of the TSSAA staff when the Fling was here before. No one has to sell him on the city's ability to deliver on its promises.

"I got a quick glance of the new softball facilities at Warner Park back in February," he said. "Very impressive. Scott and I have had a couple of discussions about the baseball. I'm sure they'll have a strong bid."

The baseball problem is twofold. The best fields are mostly up the road in Cleveland. And unlike Warner Park's Frost Stadium, there is no grand community field -- as Engel Stadium once was -- to host championship games.

"But we hope to have something to make the TSSAA happy by July 13," Smith said.

Bidding for any sports or entertainment event has gotten far tougher than it used to be.

"All these organizations (like TSSAA) are asking for more than they used to," said Smith, who took over for Merrill Eckstein this year when Eckstein was chosen to run Finley Stadium. "Sometimes you have to ask what an event is really worth. And in these difficult economic times you have to be wary of taking a financial risk."

A case in point is the TSSAA's football championship package, which was recently awarded to Cookeville and the Tennessee Tech facilities. Chattanooga probably lost the bid only because Finley has two locker rooms instead of four.

"The locker rooms were huge (as an issue)," Childress said. "Everything else we felt was perfect."

But there's where it gets tricky. The quick response is to convert two current storage rooms near Finley's current locker rooms into additional locker space. But what if that were to cost $750,000 or more?

"I don't think building locker rooms for a three-day event you might not get is justifiable," Smith said. "You'd have to raise a bunch of money. We have more important needs."

Even Eckstein, who would benefit the most from upgrades to Finley, didn't wildly embrace the notion of two more locker rooms.

"Would it help us? I think the answer is yes," he said. "But it's a very reserved yes."

What is not reserved is Smith's commitment to keep Chattanooga on the sports event map.

"We want to look at anything and everything," he said. "Everything doesn't have to be on ESPN to be an important event for us. There are a lot of lesser-known sports that we should go after, such as horseshoes and darts."

But that doesn't mean Smith doesn't appreciate our town's thing for the Fling.

"I'm probably asked more about when we can get the Fling back than any other thing," he said.

Come July 13, Smith will have his chance to give us the answer we want. But whatever happens, we should all feel good that he won't falsely promise an Usher concert to bend the bid in our favor.