The 22U Prince Albert Royals won their provincial championship in their first year back. (Facebook/Prince Albert Minor Baseball.)

By Nick Nielsen

Provincial hardware comes to Prince Albert

Successful season for Prince Albert Minor Baseball

Aug 15, 2024 | 5:00 PM

Along with success on the field, Prince Albert Minor Baseball is celebrating one of their most successful years with how many athletes competed for their teams this year. With seven teams heading to provincials this year, the season capped off with a Provincial title in the first year of the U22 baseball season.

Nathan Noble just finished his first year as the president of Prince Albert Minor Baseball, and he said the biggest success this year was the amount of kids playing baseball this year.

“Definitely the biggest number of kids playing baseball since I started and it’s awesome to see. Obviously, the pandemic put a little hit on that, but since then it’s been nothing but increasing in numbers and increasing in teams and we’re at pretty much capacity as far as our fields go. So it’s great.”

The 22U team also competed at Western Canadian Championships this year where they managed to win a game in a tough field with a ton of junior college experience. For the 18Us, they played Premier AA this season and managed to make playoffs but did not manage to win a series.

At the 15U level, the Prince Albert Royals had one team finish one win away from winning the Tier 1 provincials but lost in the final to Saskatoon. The other 15U team played in Tier 4 provincials, and they lost in the semi final.

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According to Noble, the two youngest age groups were some of the most successful teams in the city this year.

“Our 13Us ended up winning a silver medal. They were in the final as well, had a great season, and our two 11U teams, one of them hosted here in Prince Albert and ended up having a couple of close games in the round robin but never made playoffs, and our other 11U team kind of did the same thing in a little bit lower tier, had a couple of really good games, but never quite made playoffs, so lots of good results, lots of good finishes.”

With the large amount of baseball players in Prince Albert this year, the biggest challenge that came throughout the season was finding diamond time for all these players. Thanks to some help from some of the surrounding towns, the season went by without any issues.

“It’s tough at times, but what we’ve been able to do is we’ve got a real good partnership with both Birch Hills and Shellbrook, and so we’ve got them in our leagues at the senior rally, 11U, 13U, 15U age groups, and so when we are running out of diamond space here, but we’re adding those two diamonds out there helps us get our league games in and then we just have to be creative with our provincial team practices. Sometimes we have to piggyback a practice in an evening or just be smart about how we coordinate that to make sure everyone gets their fair shot at some diamond space.”

Now the baseball season is over with no one playing any competitive games throughout the rest of the year. There is one more game to be played in Prince Albert though as the minor baseball association is trying to introduce softball players into baseball.

“We’ve got a board member that’s trying to introduce baseball to a few softball kids, and so he’s got a little team going. He’s got a game this Friday here, which is probably going to be the last game that any of our baseball teams play. But he put a little team together of kids born in 2014 and is playing a Saskatoon team just to introduce some softball kids to baseball and let them experience that as well.”

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nick.nielsen@pattisonmedia.com