The Baseball Canada Cup was a great experience for local coach Blaine Kovach and umpire Kevin Culy.
Kovach was the assistant coach for the Team Saskatchewan, which had won gold the previous year, and Culy worked one of the semifinal games at the annual midget-aged tournament that took place Aug. 8-12 in Moncton, NB.
“It’s great to see pitchers out there throwing 91, 92 miles an hour regularly, and hitters are out there hitting home runs and doubles, guys are fast,” said Kovach, the head coach of the Southeast Performance Pump Twins’ midget AAA team based in Estevan. “It was a really good experience and a really good time.”
The team won the 5/6 playoff game against Quebec and overall went 3-4 in the tournament.
Kovach is the performance director for Estevan Minor Baseball and will be taking some lessons from the tournament into camps.
“I truly wish we had more players like this all over Saskatchewan and especially down here,” he said. “That’s what they love and that’s what they excel at but around here, they’re focusing a lot on hockey. They’re multisport athletes and I love the multisport athletes but it would be nice to get guys who want to advance themelves in baseball and take that next step and … go to college and get to where these players are at right now. It would be an amazing thing.”
Kovach would like to drive baseball as a primary sport more and more and get more players from the southeast doing well.
“In general in the southeast we need to get better,” Kovach said. “There’s a lot of talent out there and a lot of potential to get that kind of talent and … the smaller centres need to get into that baseball buzz. That’s the big thing that we’re going to try to push around the southeast, get out there and play more ball, try and get better. There are a lot of opportunities to get better and to go somewhere with it.”
Culy meanwhile is a veteran umpire with high certification. He got the plum assignment during the May long weekend.
“My initial reaction was surprise,” said Culy. “Usually for a major assignment they’ll phone ahead just to make sure that you’re able to go and everything. This year they just announced it and my name came up.”
Culy has donned umpire’s equipment for 20 years, and has had the Baseball Canada national program, achieving Level 4 status among umpires. He’s been at two Canada Cups and this was his seventh national assignment.
“The baseball is usually really good at that level,” said Culy of the Canada Cup. “The games are fun to work because the baseball is really good.”
