Opening Day Saturday
SABA hosting annual event at Queen Elizabeth Park to kick off 2018 season
It’s a sure sign summer is just around the corner.
The Summerside Area Baseball Association (SABA) will host its annual Opening Day at Queen Elizabeth Park on Saturday, June 2.
“Opening Day was started a few years back,” explained firstyear SABA president Tanner Doiron, who served as the association’s field co-ordinator in 2017. “Gary Barlow, one of our board members, thought of the idea as a way to get all the Summerside Chevys’ teams on the field, and each one of them play a game to open the season.” A total of 19 games are scheduled for Saturday, beginning at 9:30 a.m., and the final one is listed to start at 8 p.m.
“We usually start with the younger kids in the morning, and finish up with the bantams or midgets under the lights,” said Doiron.
“We want to get the community out, and make it a good day of baseball.”
Doiron indicated SABA has taken steps to make it a family event as well.
“We’ll also have some live music by Allan Sonier from 2 to 4 p.m., we’ll have bouncy castles set up for little kids, sponsored by Sport Event Tourism Summerside, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.” he said.
“We’ll have a free barbecue put on by the Consolidated Credit Union from noon to 3 p.m., so this place should be busy and packed all day long.”
As an added bonus, the P.E.I. Juniors, who sport a 3-3 (wonlost) record and feature some SABA products, will host the Saint John Alpines in a New Brunswick Junior Baseball League doubleheader at QEP’s Legends Field on Sunday. The first pitch of Game 1 will take place at noon.
“It’s a great opportunity to get our kids out to see what they could play eventually,” said Doiron.
“We invite all teams to come out and watch this.”
Busy season
Saturday also marks the beginning of a busy 2018 season for SABA, which has experienced about a 12-per-cent increase in registration numbers over last year. Around 324 kids have registered for the 2018 season.
“We’ll see about 18 teams at the competitive level in our association, from midget down to junior mosquito,” explained Doiron. “Then if you add our pony and blastball teams, our programming has about 28 teams.”
SABA will continue to host weekend tournaments at QEP under the chairmanship of Darrel Kirev. Doiron noted there will be 10 tournaments held over nine weekends.
“This park, basically every weekend starting after Opening Day, right through to September, will be busy,” offered Doiron in an interview with the Journal Pioneer in the stands of the Very Important Volunteer
Field on Monday afternoon. “Every weekend will have a tournament. “We are going to try and grow our tournaments a bit larger than we have had in the past. Last year, we kept them to around eight teams a tournament.
“This year we are looking to possibly even doubling that to help the economic impact around the city.”
One highlight will be SABA hosting the national Atlantic 13-under Baseball Canada championships from Sept. 13 to 16.
“That will be a big tournament that we are actually taking on this year,” said Doiron. “We, as an association, put a bid in on this, and we’ll see about two teams from every Atlantic province, so it’s similar to the Eastern Canadian setup.”