Special tribute for Costello
Auckland Tuatara manager Steve Mintz reveals the players will wear Ryan Costello’s initials on their team jerseys for the rest of the year, as he details a harrowing few days since the 23-year-old was found dead on Monday morning.
This week has been an incredibly challenging one for all of us at the Tuatara. No-one can prepare themselves for something like what we’ve gone through these past few days.
There have been so many emotions and everyone thinks and reacts differently, but we have all been hurting one way or another.
You look at the staff and how it makes us feel – it has had a massive impact. We are hurting but at the same time we are the ones who are supposed to lead and look after these young men.
We have tried to keep in touch with everyone and make sure that they had everything they needed with however they were feeling. We had counsellors and chaplains and whatever made available to everyone. No-one here has dealt with anything like this before, so it was a first time for all of us.
I think Tuesday saw the guys get a little more pep in their step and yesterday a little more again.
We will be very careful with how we address things as we move along because it is not going to be something that just goes away.
We have talked about how we want to honour Ryan as a group and we decided we wanted to carry something on our uniforms that signified his impact with us. We will wear his initials on our jerseys for the rest of the season.
Tonight we will honour him for a few moments at the new stadium – we will have a moment’s silence, we’ll put his picture up on the big screen and some words to remember him and show how important he was going to be to our team and how much he impacted the people here in the short period of time he was with us.
We are also mindful of honouring his family, who are hurting a lot more than the rest of us. We can only imagine what they are going through and we want to be there for them in whatever way we can.
The team will play hard and will be focused on the task at hand and we won’t look to use this experience as an excuse. We have some very talented players in our group this year and we have set some lofty goals.
There is a core group of New Zealanders that we will lean on – Luke Hansen had a terrific season last year and we hope to see him take another step. Likewise, with Max Brown – we think he will be important for us. Te Wera Bishop will play a lot as well.
We have some very exciting imports this season. We think Jeremy Vasquez will hit really well in this league and have high hopes for him.
Jared Walker will play in the infield and will hit in the middle of our order and drive in some runs and Josh Morgan will be a steady hand for us with his glove while giving us quality at bats.
We like the back end of our bullpen this season and we feel we have a sound rotation so we are going to be a competitive team that plays the right way.