Bemidji hosts Sub-State F tournament after storm delay
Bemidji got the Sub-State F tournament back after a 2025 storm sent it to Perham, giving the Woodpeckers a home chance to defend last year’s title.
Bemidji hosted the Sub-State F junior Legion tournament after the June 21, 2025 storm forced last year’s event to Perham, giving the Woodpeckers a home-field chance to defend the District F title they won away from home.
The move mattered beyond baseball. Tournament weekends pull players, parents and coaches into town, and that usually means more traffic for local restaurants, hotels and other businesses around Bemidji. It also gave the area a chance to stage a postseason event in front of its own crowd after weather had taken that chance away.
The storm that knocked the tournament out of Bemidji was severe enough that Beltrami County Emergency Management said it was ramping down its response after nearly two weeks. The National Weather Service estimated straight-line winds at 90 to 120 miles per hour and described a ten-mile-wide swath of damage across southern Beltrami County. Beltrami Electric said more than 16,800 members had been restored, while about 2,500 were still without power at one point after the storm.
That disruption sent the junior Legion postseason tournament to Perham last summer, where Bemidji turned in one of the strongest runs in its program history. The Woodpeckers beat East Grand Forks 10-0 in five innings, topped Perham 6-2 and shut out Fergus Falls 7-0 in the championship game to win the District F Sub-State Tournament. Bemidji then advanced to the state tournament in Bloomington Aug. 1-3, 2025, entering state with a 19-2 record.
Head coach Travis Carruth said the 2025 group was one of the deepest teams he had coached. He also said, “We made it to the state tournament in 2022 and we took fourth place.”
This year’s return to Bemidji carried that same competitive edge, but with a different backdrop. Instead of being displaced by storm damage, the tournament came back to the city it was meant to be in, giving the Woodpeckers a chance to defend their title on home ground and letting local fans see a postseason event that had been out of reach a year earlier.
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