Barrhead hosted the Tier II PeeWee Competitive Baseball Provincial tournament over the weekend, where six teams competed for the right to call themselves champions.
The tournament began Friday, July 27 at noon and wrapped up Sunday evening.
The Barrhead Yankees, led by coaches Rod Callihoo, Dwayne Sonnenberg, and Murray Carstairs, were up against five other competitive and challenging teams.
The Yankees had a tough start during their first game of the tournament Friday night. Their battle against the Calgary Cubs began at 6:30, but didn't last as long as they would have liked. With a score of 13-3, the team only played into the bottom of the fifth inning before the game was called and Calgary walked away with the victory.
Game two on Saturday at noon went better than the night before when Barrhead played the Stony Plain Royals.
Barrhead performed well, taking the lead early on and continuing towards an easy victory. However, the Royals gave Barrhead a run for their money as they rallied and made an impressive comeback. But, after much excitement, the Yankees came out on top, winning the game 11-9.
As the Yankees entered in to the semi finals, they took to the diamond against the Sherwood Park Gold Athletics. Unfortunately Barrhead was met with another loss when their opponents took the game with a score of 11-3.
With only one win and two losses, that was it for the Yankees. Head coach Rod Callihoo said in spurts, he thought this was the best his team had played all year.
"I don't think we consistently played that level all weekend," said Callihoo. "We struggled with hitting at times. The last couple weeks we didn't hit the ball quite as well as we could."
Field, on the other hand, was a different story. Callihoo said the players did well out in the field, perhaps fielding better than they have in a while. Although the abilities of the team shone through at times, coaches said it just wasn't enough to make it to the finals.
"We lacked that little bit of intensity to push us over to be more successful," said Callihoo.
"You need to trust in yourself and your teammates," added assistant coach Dwayne Sonnenberg.
Finished for the year, the Yankees played about 20 games this season. Callihoo said the team worked well together for the most part, and just needs to learn to work together, and trust more as ball players.
"We were just a good average overall team," said Callihoo. "We have really good athletic ability, and that ability needs to be trusted and developed a little bit more.
