The baseball team started in Blount County in 1876 and was called the Reckless Baseball Club.

MARYVILLE, Tenn. — The same field that the Maryville College Scots baseball team warms up on in Blount County ahead of its 2026 season is what the first team played on, too.

Maryville College is gearing up for its 150th season and celebrating the team and its ballpark, believed to be one of the oldest original fields still in use in all of college baseball. 

For Head Coach Clint Helton and his team, it’s an honor to be part of a milestone year.

“As an alumni myself, I  graduated here in 2011, came back to coach in 2014, and been here since, tied up in almost 16 years in the 150, it’s pretty special to me as an alumni,” he said. 

The college is celebrating too and held a banquet over the weekend to honor what was originally known as the Reckless Baseball Club.

Maryville College Archivist Amy Lundell said the team was started by a group of best friends and faced off against other Maryville College students, dubbed the Independents. 

The first game was played in February 1876 and ended in a 39-39 tie.

Lundell said rules were different 150 years ago, so final scores were often much higher than they are today.

“In doing a bit of research, we realized that was because it was tradition at the time for the baseball player to call their own pitch,” she said. “So the person up at bat would tell the pitcher what kind of ball they wanted, which made it a lot easier to hit.”

She said she pored over old diaries kept by players to get an idea of what life was like for them when they started.

In that research, she came across an interesting tidbit.

“The baseball field has never changed location, ” she said. “It has been in that location since 1876, we have a photograph of it in that exact location in 1895, and we know that nothing was built that would  cause it to move … which means we’ve been playing on that exact field for 150 years.”