Kiwanis fail to repeat

    The Kiwanis team couldn’t do it against the Moose either last Thursday or Friday—failing to repeat as Major ‘B’ champions of the International Falls Little League.
    After enduring a 12-2 blowout on Thursday evening, the Fort Frances-based squad put up a ferocious effort Friday but let a game-long lead slip away in the bottom of the sixth inning, losing 11-10.
    “The team we played in the final had only lost one game, and that was to us,” Kiwanis manager Michael Kitt noted shortly after Friday’s game, referring to a victory earlier in the playoffs that had sent the Moose to the relegation side.
    “You never like to lose, but we felt like we lost to a team that deserved to win,” Kitt added.
    The Moose were nothing if not tenacious. Coming up to bat in the third inning, they home team was down 8-0 when manager Tim Mellstrom prophetically encouraged his players to score four runs to get them back in the game.
    Sure enough, the Moose trailed by a more manageable score of 8-4 at the end of the third—and by only 9-8 at the end of the fourth.
    And when they trailed 10-9 after five innings, the momentum seemed to be in their favour despite never having had a lead in the game.
    A triple led to the Moose’s tying run in the sixth on a throw on a sloppy play that had Kiwanis looking at their worst. Despite a strong effort with the last few batters, a bases-loaded walk ended the game with the home side as the victor.
    “It was very exciting,” said Mellstrom. “It was a great game. It was a classic Little League ball game . . . too bad a team had to lose.”
    The nine- and 10-year-old Canadian boys had hoped to take the championship the day before, as their being undefeated in the playoffs put the Moose against the ropes facing elimination.
    But Kiwanis struggled for five innings on Thursday as their rivals posted a smattering of small-ball runs—most of them on errant throws—before breaking the game wide open in the top of the sixth.
    Kiwanis got on the board in the bottom of the sixth, but their two-run rally was too little, too late.
    Kitt said his team’s main problem on both nights was lack of run production—specifically in the last three innings of Friday’s game.
    “In this league, you need to throw strikes,” he added. “And at the end of the day, they made some good hits.”
    Kiwanis had won last year’s Major ‘B’ championship against Super One by a score of 12-2 in five innings in a similar situation, having lost their first chance at the title the day before.
    The team was the best shot at Canuck glory in the International Falls Little League as the Barwick Merchants lost to a tough Northern Lumber squad on Thursday—falling a win short of an appearance in the final of Major ‘A’ division.