St. Paul Storm peewees earn AA Provincial silver medal

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St. Paul peewee baseball players can celebrate a Provincial medal.

The peewee St. Paul Storm AA squad hosted Provincials last weekend and walked away with a silver medal, losing to the Clive Red Sox in the final.

Coach Joe Young said the team worked their way up to Tier II and it’s a big accomplishment.

“We were hoping to make the semi-final and see where it goes from there. I was just happy with the effort throughout the year. It was just a great way to end it.

“The kids work extremely hard this summer. It’s not easy for the kids and for the parents to devote to Provincial baseball. It’s a long summer and you have your holidays taken away. I have a lot of gratitude to them.”

The Storm had battled back from the brink of elimination earlier in the tournament to even make the playoff round.

After an opening 7-5 win against Leduc and a narrow lose extra-innings lose to Clive, the Storm needed to beat Didsbury to advance to the semi-finals.

The Storm trailed 10-1 in the fourth inning before rallying to come back with an improbable 12-10 win.

The Storm’s bats came alive, said Young.

The semi-final victory against Okotoks 9-3 was probably the team’s best of the tournament, said Young, which cemented a medal for the Tier II provincial team.

“They were 3-0 in their pool during the round-robin and they’ve been a good team all year. They’ve been at the top of double-A standings and we ended up beating them,” said Young.

“We had very strong pitching that game and it was probably our best game of the tournament.”

The gold medal game against Clive was the fifth match of the tournament, which left the Storm with some sore arms in the dugout and resorting to mixing up their pitching lineup.

“They beat us pretty handily. But I’m extremely proud of the kids. They came along a long way from when we started in March in the gym, and they drastically improved every week, and every weekend we played,” said Young.

“Eventually you’re gonna run out of pitching. And that’s kind of what happened to us.”

“We had a great group of kids… I think they’re gonna look back at this and really have fond memories and hope they learned a lot.”