The 20th season of sanctioned high school softball is set to begin on Aug. 16. Plenty of progress has been made with the sport that began with a single class and now has 108 teams, and even more schools thanks to co-op arrangements in all three classes.

Class A has 28 teams, while Class B and Class C both have 40 schools for a total of 108 squads all with one aim — a berth in the Oct. 10-12 state tournaments in Hastings.

Players or former coaches — please, just folks from those two groups — who have memories about those early seasons they’d like to share, send them to me. We can post a few here and maybe a story can be developed closer to the postseason. The email address is alexsdad@mail.com.

In the meantime, coaches of 2012 teams, please get your preview sheets to me by Monday. Only 25 percent of them have arrived so far. Need a bigger sampling to get those preseason guesses, uh, I mean ratings, at least in the ballpark.