The U14-B Medicine Hat Thunder swept the provincial tournament this weekend to take home gold.--SUBMITTED PHOTO
lthomson@medicinehatnews.com
Medicine Hat was the place to be for the U14-B Girls provincial softball tournament over the weekend, where the Thunder team took home provincial gold.
The Medicine Hat Thunder U14-B girls softball team head coach Chris Grad had all positives to report after the team won first place.
Friday and Saturday saw nine teams play round-robin games in order to be ranked from one through nine.
“We went 4-0 in the round robin,” said Grad. “Calgary Adrenaline was also 4-0 at the round robin, so it went to runs against to determine who would finish in first place and we had the least amount of runs against, so we seeded first.”
The Thunder beat the Calgary Vipers in the semi-final and moved on to face the Lloydminster Liners in the gold medal game, which they won 14-6.
“Runs were hard to come by all weekend,” said Grad. “We really had to chisel away at every inning that we played. The gold medal game was no different, we were just back and forth – they would score a couple and we would score a couple. We broke it open in the bottom of the sixth inning and scored seven, which is the max per inning that you can score, which put us ahead by eight.”
Grad said since the tournament was playing seven-inning games, there was no chance for the Lloydminster Liners to catch up so the game was called.
“We had timely hits, we had really good pitching all weekend, good catching, we scored runs when we had to and took advantage of when the other teams made errors,” Grad said of his team’s tournament sweep.
Grad said it was a united team effort all weekend with different players stepping up in different situations. After being unable to play a full season in 2020, Thunder teams were formed in early March this year to help athletes get going again.
“We started practising indoors right away, just trying to help these young athletes get their skills back sharp. There was a huge effort by them to make up for lost time from last year.”
Grad says the success in the tournament came from the hard work team members put in throughout the year.
“I think the big takeaway for me was defensive play,” said Grad. “We started off this year committing more errors than the girls and the coaching staff thought we should. We just got better and better all year long and this weekend showed the hard work that the girls put in and our defence was really sound.”
Grad wanted to thank all the volunteers “that helped keep the diamonds in good shape and ran beer gardens and the merchandise table, and setup and cleanup. It was just all-hands-on deck to get everything set up and torn down.
“The amount of compliments that we got from other cities, other teams that were here, it was great to hear; we ran a first-class provincial tournament. It’s good to see softball happening in southeastern Alberta; we typically have to travel to Calgary and north to get any games, so it’s just nice to have it in our own backyard here.”
