The St. Albert Angels midget A softball team is hoping a little international flavour will rub off on them at a tournament later this week.
The Angels have been invited to Surrey, B.C., to participate in the U19 Futures Gold division at the Scotiabank Canadian Open Fastpitch International Championships, which runs from Saturday, July 9 to Sunday, July 17. They’ll be up against competition from across Western Canada, as well as teams from the United States, Great Britain, Peru and Brazil.
Head coach Chuck McNutt said that both he and the girls on the team are getting pretty excited to test their mettle against some of the world’s best.
“You always have to play up. You play up and you play to that level,” he said. “You start playing down and you play to that level. Whenever we play better teams, we play better — there’s no doubt about that.”
McNutt can’t say if the culture of softball is any different in places like South America or Europe, but he can speak from experience about the U.S.
“Those guys are very serious about their softball,” he said. “You go down to southern California and down east into Florida, the southern states, they take that ball seriously and they are dedicated to it.”
Aside from playing, the Angels will have a rare opportunity to learn from some of the sport’s best, as five of the six top-ranked ladies’ fastpitch teams in the world will be in Surrey to compete in the International Division.
“That is just an exceptional quality of ball to be able to there and watch and just observe what’s going on,” McNutt said. “That’s going to be a good thing for the girls.”
Teams competing in Surrey include the United States, Japan and Canada — who finished 1-2-3 in the 2010 International Softball Federation world championships — along with Venezuela and Australia.
“There’s so much you can learn from that — the ability and the intensity, the level of play they have to get to to get there,” McNutt said. “I think what they’ll be able to see is how some of these girls are playing and what kind of effort they put in and really how close some of these girls are to being able to get to that level. It’s not like it’s miles away; a lot of them have pretty good ability and an opportunity to get to that level.”
Before the Canadian Open, the Angels had to worry about their provincial championship, which was held over the weekend in Leduc.
The St. Albert squad finished in third place in the midget A division, which pleased McNutt.
“We were right in the middle of the pack there and that’s where we should have been,” he said. “We had some really good games and played well.”
The Angels finished the round robin portion of the tournament in a four-way tie for third place with a 2-2 record, and had to play several tiebreakers before the final result shook out.
“We’re a first-year team, a pretty strong team, and we have a lot of great potential,” he said. “We had a lot of good things happening — great base running, a lot of great fielding plays, some great pitching this weekend. All in all, everyone played really well.”
