After years of being on the bench, a Sooke Triangle baseball team is heading to the provincials.
The U15 team of 12 boys will go to the Hardball Provincial Championships in Burnaby on July 22. They are rated AA, making it a house rep team, something that hasn’t been heard of on this side of the Island for a while, noted manager Chris Cox.
“They are super excited to take part in this,” he said, adding it’s the first year in a lot of years that basically a house club team has been able to go, as Victoria is usually the one that makes a team and draws from all five parks.
In this triangle team, there are two Sooke boys taking part, Tommy Hueston and Brad Cox, both 15, and both very determined, their coach noted.
Both are fairly seasoned for their age too; Tommy has six years of hardball experience, while Brad has eight. This will come particularly handy, considering there are 30 teams taking part in the provincials.
Cox, who is also president of Sooke Triangle Hardball Association, said they’re in good shape in terms of where they are in their training.
“They’re still only 15, so they can play really good at times, other times they’re not really there,” he said, adding that the main objective here is that they have fun, if nothing else.
Right now their team average for hitting is 520, a fair bit above average for a team this size.
Beyond the tournament, Cox said both boys want to keep on playing high performance baseball, so they’ll go try out for the junior premier teams.
Cox noted that the added interest in hardball in recent years will also help Sooke Triangle create a bantam team by next year.
“Sooke is starting to come around. [Hardball] is growing, so that’s always good to see,” he said.