Department of Minnesota introduces app for state’s Legion Baseball program

When Tim Engstrom, the director of communications for the Department of Minnesota, saw what was possible through The American Legion’s national convention app, he was inspired to create something similar for the department.

Engstrom is starting with an app for Minnesota’s American Legion Baseball program; the app is now available through Apple and Google Play.

“I want to do it eventually for our Department of Minnesota conventions and fall conference and other gatherings; you can just put everything in an app,” Engstrom said.

Minnesota’s app includes the state baseball rulebook; the national senior and junior Legion Baseball rulebooks; the 2021 Major League Baseball rulebook (the most recent version Engstrom was able to retrieve in PDF form); scores and ways to report them; the American Legion Baseball code of sportsmanship; important dates and more.

Engstrom acknowledged that saving on printing and postage were a primary motivator in creating the app.

“Every year we would spend money on printing of a rulebook as well as mailing out of a rulebook and other materials in a preseason manager’s kit,” Engstrom said. “We still did a mailing this year, but it was mainly as a crossover year to alert them that the rules are now on this app. … That’s going to save us a lot of postage (and thousands of dollars).”

Engstrom said the actual creation of the app, using AppMachine, was “very simple.”

“The hard part was how to publish it in Google and Apple. But AppMachine provides plenty of instructions, and if you’re patient with waiting until the next day, they provide good support. And often when I would ask them a question, I would sometimes find out the answer on my own by just poking around to make it work before they got back to me,” he said.

Engstrom hopes the app’s audience grows beyond just the department’s coaches and managers. He’s optimistic that bench players tasked with keeping score will use the app to report scores.

“It’s good for the program. There’s a lot of young people involved in baseball,” Engstrom said — not only players but parents and some of the younger coaches. “It’s a great demographic to try new technology on, because they’re the people who use new technology. Then once you get that in place, then you can take that technology and use it on other parts of your department or district or post.”