Clyde resident Levi Cohoe brought home a gold medal after his team dominated the softball tournament at the 2012 Alberta Summer Games in Lethbridge last month.
Of the eight local athletes who earned the right to compete in the games, Cohoe was the only medalist. What’s more impressive, he’d never played the sport before this year and his team had just two days of practice before hitting the tournament.
The 13-year-old athlete has played baseball in Clyde for many years, so it wasn’t a completely new experience for him. The subtle differences between the two sports, however, presented a few challenges.
“I like baseball better,” he said. “Softball is pretty hard because the pitching mound is way closer and you have to react a bit faster.”
His team went nearly undefeated in the tournament, losing just one game — during the round-robin, his Zone 5 team lost 8-2 to the Zone 7 team. In the gold-medal game against that same team, however, Cohoe’s team got their revenge with a hard-fought 1-0 win.
“We knew the team was hard, because the only game we lost was to that team,” he said.
“In the first inning we scored a point, and that’s the only point we got.”
Another notable finish for local athletes was fourth place in the boys’ lacrosse tournament.
Two local players, Adam Hardinge and Daneel Lategan, played on that team. Despite not medaling, Hardinge was given the honour of being named team captain.
“I was really excited. That’s definitely a huge accomplishment,” he said.
Of the 40 players who tried out for the team, Hardinge and Lategan were two of the 18 players who made it — an impressive feat for players from a rural club.
Even more impressive for Hardinge was the news that after a couple practices, the coach saw him as leadership material.
“He just said that over the tryouts and practices we’d had, there were three of us on the floor, he just said ‘You guys have shown good leadership over the practices and you guys will be the ones who will lead this team,’” Hardinge said.
That accolade forced him to change up his game a little bit, he said, as it meant he was always conscious of how his attitude would affect the other players.
“I felt I needed to control my emotions more on the floor; I couldn’t get riled up during the games or anything,” he said. “I just controlled myself better.”
The bronze-medal game was a hard-fought one, Hardinge added, but in the end the Zone 7 team came out on top.
“It was pretty close all the way through until the last 10 minutes or so. Then we kind of let it go.”
As for the other local athletes, there was less success on the podium but just making it to this level is an impressive feat in and of itself.
Austin Watamaniuk’s baseball team struggled and came to a seventh-place finish, while Dante Lusson and his rugby team finished eighth.
Anna Manchester and Kellie Cord saw their rugby team finish fourth after a tight bronze-medal match, while Rachael Casavant missed the podium in her many swimming events.
For all the athletes, however, the experience of going to the games was doubtless a good one.
Cohoe said he felt the whole experience whet his appetite for a future of competitive sports.
“I think it was a really good experience. We got to know a lot of people, and it’s a good start of a career as an athlete.”
For Hardinge, the greatest part of the experience was simply being part of such and exciting and well-run event.
“It was lots of fun. “Lethbridge did a good job of putting on the Games; it was really well organized.”
