Woodstock Tournament Champions
What a fantastic job by all 13 of these young athletes to pull off an amazing weekend of ball and win the Woodstock Wranglers Major Rookie Tournament.
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The boys went into the tournament with no wins on the season but were playing good ball and coming up on the wrong end of 5 different one run losses.
We played a tough Kitchener team on Friday night who beat us last year twice. We cam out swinging the bats and took a 7-0 lead into the bottom of the 1st inning and the boys did not look back making some great defensive plays and every kid contributed with hits for the 14-4 final.
On to playing Saturday am against Lucan/Ilderton which turned out to be a tight game back and forth with both teams making some dbl plays. The bats were hot again and we used our Home field advantage to pull out a victory in the 7th inning with a final score of 12-11.
The boys then got to compete in a skills competition which we did really well in and actually finished in second place behind the Simcoe Giants team. We won the Home Run Competition with Nicholas, Brady and the anchor James putting lots of balls out to the grass. All the kids did really well in all the events which showed in our 2nd place finish there.
We then moved on to play the hometown Woodstock Wranglers at their home diamond. It was a tough battle back and forth for the first few innings but we didn't have enough left in the tank and we lost our first game to the hometown team. But with finishing 2-1 we moved onto the semi's on Sunday morning.
On to Sunday morning we played the Simcoe Giants who up to this point had not lost a game on the season and who were the top team moving into the weekend. It was an epic battle back and forth with the boys pounding the ball at the plate and making amazing plays on the defensive side of the field. 7 innings of ball turned out not to be enough ball for these 2 teams. The 8th inning came and went with both teams going 3 up/3 down sending us to the 9th inning. We were the home team and came out and shut them down in the top of the 9th inning. So there we were in the bottom of the 9th inning in a semi final game with the top of the order up to bat you almost couldn't script it better. Jagan came up to bat and hit a triple to lead us off, this is when it got exciting with Simcoe moving all there fielders in to the 44ft mark on the infield all we needed was a line drive over their heads to cash #2 in at home. Andrew did just that and Jagan s head first slide into home to end the game.
We then went to the finals against our league rivals the London Tecumsehs. The Tecumseh's are a great hitting/defensive team that we had to match up against after such an emotional win against Simcoe just an hour before. The game started out pretty slow for both teams but then in the top of the 3rd inning we scored 7 runs. The Tecumseh's went back in the bottom of the inning and scored 4 of their own. The 4th inning featured a 3 up/3down inning for both teams including dbl plays. We got shut down again in the 5th inning, and Tecumseh's scored in the bottom of the 5th 1 run of their own. The boys dug deep at this point and went out to smash the ball in the top of the 6th inning to try and increase our 9-8 lead at this point. We did just that and sent 9 batters to the plate to get our 7 runs in to make the score 16-8. The boys knew the mission at this point that we just had to hold them in the bottom of the 6th to win the game and they did just that in impressive fashion with another 3 up/3 down inning!!!!
The coaching staff could not be more proud of the effort and compete level of the boys over the course of the weekend, the boys handled those close stress filled games to perfection and never gave up to keep battling and pull out the "W's" when we needed them the most.
Way to go TINCAPS MAJOR ROOKIE"S
Coach Shaun.