The standings won’t tell you how Team Manitoba Senior Women’s Baseball Team found success last week in Quebec City at the 2024 Baseball Canada National Championships.
Team Manitoba went 1-4 and finished last in the tournament.
To understand the whole story, one must examine the team and their intentions for the tournament much more deeply.
Head coach Kevin Booker, assistants Mike Krykewich and Dan Moir, and manager Rachelle Aime announced the roster in early July.
Initially in charge of finding a coach for the team, Booker stepped up to coach when he couldn’t find someone to take the job.
For Booker, this wasn’t the first time he’d coached a provincial team. Back in 1997, Booker headed up Team Manitoba at the Canada Games, along with other years of coaching college baseball in the United States and locally at the U18 level.
As he stepped into the new role in 2024, the team they began assembling was much younger than any team Manitoba had rostered before at the tournament.
This year’s roster featuring multiple locals included Liberty Aime (Clandeboye), Amber Baker (Yellowhead), Dayle Bettens (Winnipeg), Emily Foster (Somerset), Kirsten Giesbrecht (Altona), Zoe Hicks (Boissevain), Ella Holm (Stonewall), Sarah Moir (Winnipeg), Ally Neufeld (Boissevain), Leah Peitsch (Winnipeg), Avery Pickering (St. Adolphe), Madisyn Robertson (Neepawa), Horizon Senff (Winnipeg), Jewell Thompson (Macgregor), and Payton Zubec (Winnipeg).
Only four players were of senior age, with the rest in junior, U18, and even U16.
Based on this reality, Booker knew this year’s team would likely not win the 2024 Nationals.
With that in mind, Booker knew that making the most of his position would take much longer than a couple of weeks to make Team Manitoba a contender at the tournament.
As the tournament neared, Booker and his staff decided to plan for the future rather than the present by announcing a U21 Team Manitoba for the coming years to help feed into the senior team.
“I kind of thought about this before the season,” said Booker following the tournament. “It’s important for the players to have some continuity with the coaching staff so we can build toward something. That was the thought going in and it’s something we’re going to follow through with.”
Next year, Team Manitoba will enter the U21 Baseball Canada Nationals with the same staff from the senior team.
The senior team will continue to exist, though based on the age of most players, Booker believes having many of the U21 players on the same team for a couple of years will help strengthen the team when they eventually all graduate into the senior age category.
“We have a lot of talented players, some really good athletes,” said Booker. “Our goal, and we’re sitting down and working on this now, is to put a more intent schedule together next year so we can be together more, be more familiar on the field, and work on our defence and offensive plays, which will help us not only perform better but improve the confidence level.”
Booker said it’s the first time Manitoba will have a U21 women’s team in years.
At Nationals this year, the team had already become much more comfortable playing together than they were before the tournament, when they had only a few practices and exhibition games together.
Early on, the team won their opening game against Team Ontario 12-8.
Though that was their only win of the tournament, Booker said the team could keep up with the country’s best teams and showed a lot of promise for the future.
Overall, Booker was pleased.
“Just a couple innings got away on us, but the team really hung together, supported each other, and put forward a great effort. We’re seeing this as a nice building block to our future teams because the youth on this team got experience.”
When group play ended, Team Manitoba was one win short of making the fifth/sixth place game.
Though they ultimately finished last, their 1-4 record was the same as Team Ontario 2 and Team Alberta’s, which finished seventh and eighth at Nationals, respectively.
With the same group of players eligible to return next year, Booker and Team Manitoba look forward to taking another step forward next year as they continue to get older and better as a team.
