In a fastball (fastpitch) tournament that spanned four days, the Bruno Merchants walked away with the Senior B Men's League Western Canadian title.
After winning the Provincial league championship in July, the Merchants marked August 16-19 on their calendars and set out to meet seven other teams from the western provinces in Abbotsford, B.C., to vie for the western title.
"We went to Westerns last year, but we lost to B.C.," said the team's coach, Ray Bender, of Bruno. "This year, we made it through to the finals and beat Lloydminster (Alberta) 5-3."
As Bender put it, the top two teams had two lives.
The Merchants played six games in the round-robin part of the tournament and were sitting at 5-1, having lost their only game to Lloydminster. That team had won its six games, and was just ahead of the Merchants with a 6-0 record going into the finals. Both teams had the possibility of coming out on top.
The Bruno players found themselves in the 1-2 playoff game against Lloydminster, and again the Alberta team cleaned up with an 8-1 win.
Then, somehow, the tables turned for the final game. It was the only team they had lost to in the tournament, and the men from Bruno finally had their revenge on the border team.
"We had some good, strong pitching by Tony Sparvier," commented Bender, "and everything else went right. Solid defence, good fielding and so on."
When they won, it was a euphoric moment for the Merchants and their coach, who saw the title slip away from them in 2010 and 2011 after winning it three years consecutively prior to that.
Bender isn't one to seek the limelight, but this title marks the second success story as a team coach in 2012.
This past winter, he led Bruno's senior men's broomball team to provincial victory in the Senior Men's Provincial Broomball Championships in March. The Axemen defeated the Odessa Outlaws 2-1 in the tournament that played out at the Elgar Petersen Arena in Humboldt.
