This upcoming summer will mark the inaugural season of the Lakeland Men’s Fastball League.
According to Ryan Sabatier, league co-founder and general manager for the Bonnyville Braves men’s fastball organization, there are eight clubs divided into east and west divisions.
After reaching out to people he knew who had previously played, Sabatier was pleasantly surprised to learn how many people would be interested in participating.
”It’s been kind of a dying sport for 10 or 12 years in the area,” he noted. “I was hoping that even four teams would have been great... But, word got around and there were other teams interested.”
Along with the Braves, there will be groups from Lac La Biche, Onion Lake, and Frog Lake.
The season will kick-off the week of May 7, however, due to everyone’s busy schedule, game days will change depending on who’s playing who.
Sabatier explained, “We’re just going to be doing one game a week, and it’s going to be on random days. It’s going to be up to the team representatives to make up the schedule. We just made up a generic one on who will play in week one, week two, and you just have to set it up.”
”We’re going to try and just do the best we can to set up the game so that we can have as many guys make it as possible, between shift work and kid’s activities,” he continued.
Toward the end of May, Sabatier hopes to organize a crossover tournament where the divisions play teams they normally wouldn’t see due to travel restrictions.
Sabatier said the sport saw a drop in popularity over 10 years ago.
”It pretty much fell off the map out here,” he described. “There were guys that just retired, other guys moved away for work, others just went to slo-pitch, men’s or mixed-modified. They just didn’t continue playing fastball.”
Last year, the Braves men’s team started back up, but weren’t included in a league.
”I, myself, got tired of playing modified ball. Defensively, the competition is equal, but, the hitting aspect, the challenge isn’t there and the pitching quality isn’t there,” he explained. “I just texted a few guys that I knew... when we played back in 2006, our junior team, and they were interested. We started back up and took it from there. We went to a couple of tournaments, and found out that there was a little bit more (interest) than we originally thought was out there.”
With the season quickly approaching, Sabatier is looking forward to what it could hold for the league.
”I’m just hoping everyone has a good time and we work out any kinks to help improve it. Hopefully (we) generate more interest in the younger kids... and, hopefully, by next year we could have 12 or 15 kids aged 10 to 12... and get a minor ball fastball program going and take a team, U10 or U12, to provincials and go from there.”
For more information on the league, call the Bonnyville Minor Ball Association at 780-812-9156.
