The St. Albert Cardinals can add a provincial baseball championship to their list of accomplishments this season.
The U15A team came out with a perfect 5-0 record to capture the championship in Canmore on Aug. 1. The win comes after a league title by the Cardinals making it a near-perfect season for the club.
Head coach Wes Webber said the team was rounded up fairly quickly before the season got underway and that everything aligned for them to end up with one of the strongest teams in the province.
“We put them together and our director gave us four or five players that we didn’t know and it’s a house league so we played twice a week and we practiced before our games,” said Webber. “The guys got better with repetition and got better at catching fly balls, fielding ground balls, and batting.”
The chemistry was evident from the get-go. The majority of the team already knew each other through other sports, and it was just a matter of learning to play baseball as a unit.
Outfielder and pitcher on the team, Jackson Fleming, said it all came together quickly.
“It was a good group of guys ... we bonded really quickly. Our chemistry was good, and it was basically just a big group of idiots playing good baseball, so it was fun,” said Fleming.
The feeling of camaraderie was felt by every player. Cassius Devlin, one of the youngest players on the team, said he never felt out of place despite being both younger and a first-year player.
“I think it was quite an honour that coach took one of the younger guys who hadn’t played baseball in a while to be with some guys who were pretty experienced,” said Devlin. “I felt like I belonged.”
Provincials weren’t on the radar for the Cardinals at the beginning of the year. Webber said he brought it up to the team after winning their league with the thought they could take home another title.
“I said, ‘If you guys want to go to provincials, we can.’ So everyone said, ‘Yeah, let's do it!’” said Webber. “We went to Camrose and ended up going 5-0 to finish 17-1 on the season.”
They not only won the championship, but they also left a warpath on their way to the title. They opened up the tournament with a 39-10 stomping of Parkland, and followed that up with a 31-10 win over High Prairie and a 15-4 victory against Bashaw.
Things got a little testy in the last two games. They fell behind in both, but found a way to rally around the adversity to keep their record perfect. They closed out the tourney with a 12-5 win over Camrose and a 15-8 decision in the gold-medal game against High Prairie.
Koen Webber, the team’s catcher and occasional pitcher, gave some insight into how the team was feeling in those close games.
“We started to get down on ourselves,” said Koen. “We just had a team meeting all of a sudden and said that we needed to play as a team, so we started playing like a team and won.”
The moment the championship was won it was an all-out celebration. The team swarmed the field with cheers and dumped a full water cooler over the head of their coach — a moment that encapsulated the incredible stretch of baseball this team played.
“After we won, the first thing we said was that we were going to dump the cooler on our coach because he deserved it,” laughed Koen.
Not often do players get to celebrate both a league championship and a provincial championship in a matter of weeks. It’ll be something they’ll cherish for a long time.
“It feels great, throwing up pictures on social media and everyone from St. Albert liked it all,” said Devlin. “I hung the medals in my room. It's pretty crazy.”
