The District 5 (North Shore) Big League all-star baseball team is headed back to the national championships for the second straight year, and this time they’ve got just one goal in mind: The World Series.
The D5 Bigs (ages 16-18) won a surprise B.C. championship last year, knocking off the juggernaut D3 team (Whalley, Langely, Coquitlam) that had owned the title for the better part of a decade.
D5 then proved their provincial title was no fluke, making it all the way to the final of the 2015 national championships where they lost to the host team from Calgary in a wild 19-15 shootout.
That team came away from the tournament knowing that they could compete against Canada’s best, while also shaking their heads about the way the final went down.
Head coach Dal Nicholson said that impartial observers thought the umpire’s calls, particularly the strike zone, were favouring the hometown team throughout the game.
“There actually were protests made by other provinces that witnessed it,” he said. “But once it happens, it’s over. The team that wins ends up leaving the next day for worlds.”
Eight members of that D5 team are back at it this year and they’ve brought reinforcements with them in their quest to get back to the national final. Several North Shore sluggers joined the team for this year’s championship run after seeing how close the team came to a national title last season.
“The way I look at it, we have a stronger team this year than we did last year, mainly because we have more depth,” said Nicholson. “D5 had never won the provincials at the Big League level (before last season). A lot of the kids had been up and played provincials at the junior level and the senior level and they always got beat up by D3, so there was kind of an adverse feeling about playing in the provincials against D3. So the fact that we beat them last year, that kind of enthused some of the kids that ordinarily wouldn’t have come out.”
The difference was evident in this year’s provincial championship series where the D5 squad dominated D3, winning 6-0 and 11-2 to sweep the best-of-three contest.
“We hit the ball really well in both games and our pitching was pretty dominant,” said Nicholson.
That earned them a return trip to nationals, which began on the weekend in Victoriaville, Que. The “Big League” level is the last stop on the Little League World Series ladder, and the winner of the national championship tournament will earn a chance to take on the world’s best in South Carolina next week.
“Their feeling was they didn’t get a fair shake in the final last year and so this year they’re not going to let the umpires make the decisions,” said Nicholson. “We’re not going to cry sour grapes this year, we’re just going to go in and do our jobs.”
The team’s pitching staff will be led by ace Wyatt Versluis, who threw a three-hit shutout in Game 1 of the provincial championship series, while outfielder Cam Filippone anchors a powerful lineup of hitters. Nicholson said they are shooting for nothing less than gold and a chance to compete for their country at the Little League World Series.
“We went on the (Baseball Canada) website and we have a picture of the Canada uniforms with the big ‘Canada’ across the chest,” said Nicholson. “We printed off a bunch of pictures of those and the kids all got those to look at every day so they have a goal.”
The national championship final is scheduled for Saturday, July 23 in Victoriaville.
Updated results can be found at petiteligue.ca.
