Florendine enjoyed Games’ experience
LOCAL PITCHER PART OF TEAM ALBERTA AT CANADA SUMMER GAMES
Chase Florendine’s trek to the Canada Summer Games in Winnipeg last week didn’t come without a little hardware.
Florendine and his Team Alberta baseball squad won the bronze medal with a 5-1 over Team Ontario in the third-place game Friday night.
But it was game the 17-year-old Lethbridge pitcher threw earlier in the week that helped put Alberta into medal contention.
As they faced the eventual gold medallist Team Saskatchewan July 31, Florendine pitched a solid six and two-thirds innings, giving up five hits and two runs and striking out three for a 6-2 win that improved Alberta to 4-1 at the time.
Team Alberta went on to lose a close 1-0 decision to Manitoba in the semifinal Thursday to settle for playing for bronze, but regrouped with third place on the line to post the 5-1 win that sent Florendine home with a medal around his neck.
Taking on the role of spectator as he took in the Lethbridge Junior Bulls/Team Alberta game at the Junior Little League Canadian Championship Monday afternoon at Spitz Stadium, Florendine reflected on the Games experience and the narrowly-missed berth in the gold medal game.
“It was fun playing,” said Florendine. “It would have been better if we were playing for the gold medal, obviously, but any medal is cool.”
Playing in Vauxhall — where he’ll be back in a couple of weeks — Florendine fell onto Baseball Alberta’s radar leading into the games.
“There are a couple of people who go scouting around Alberta,” he said. “There are a bunch of different camps to go to. There’s a camp called Top 40, so the top 40 players in Alberta go to that. They pick between those guys and we go to this pretournament when they have an idea who’s going to be on the team.”
A trip to a tournament in Yakima, Wash., followed.
“We played a tournament there and we did alright and two days after that you got the call if you made it or not,” said Florendine.
The majority of his Team Alberta teammates had played together before, but prior to the games Florendine had always been the opponent.
So in the days leading up to the Summer Games, the foes became friends.
“There was a lot of chirping, friendly chirping, at the start about whose team was better. It was good,” said Florendine.
Alberta went 5-1 in the roundrobin, their lone loss coming to Saskatchewan.
“We gelled pretty well,” said Florendine. “We had only practised two days before we left and we had to play two days after that. We had a really short amount of time. A lot of those guys had played with with each other for a while. I’ve only played against these guys and have never played with them. It was a challenge, but it worked. We were a good team.”