Last week, Baseball Manitoba held clinics in Fort Frances and Emo in hopes of forming a foundation for future programs in the region.
Roger Langlais is a former Rainy River District resident and is now the president of Baseball Manitoba. Langlais says he can remember growing up playing baseball in the District.
“I grew up in the Rainy River/Fort Frances area and played back in the day,” he said.
“We played in the U.S. and had a team out of Rainy River and Pinewood way back when. But you always aged out and then we’d transition to men’s fastball and ladies fastball.”
In recent years many district families have enrolled in little league programs across the border in Minnesota. But playing in the U.S. is not something everyone wants or can afford to do. In part because it comes with the extra expense of having to drive over the toll bridge, and then the exchange rate can also be costly.
A spring little league has run in Emo for the last couple of years and Langlais is hopeful that Baseball Manitoba can help local programs grow.
One of the local contact people is Langlais’ nephew, Chris Faragher, who is helping spearhead the effort to bring local baseball back to the district.
“Baseball Manitoba offers baseball programming across Manitoba, our membership is around 15,000, but we also extend our baseball programs into northwestern Ontario,” Langlais said.
“Kenora and Red Lake have been active members of baseball Manitoba and offer full-fledged programming.”
Langlais says the first step to seeing growth in the game in the District was to offer the recent clinics and start to gauge interest.
“There’s been some discussion between our Baseball Manitoba staff, particularly our Executive Director, Jason Miller, and folks within Fort Frances and Emo,” Langlais said.
“The first step is really getting some exposure this summer by doing some skill development camps. Our hope in the future, you know, next year where Baseball Manitoba would work with the volunteers within the Rainy River District to form a baseball association, and that they would actually take registration and you can start. You kind of walk before you run. Maybe they start with, you know, we have established programs like ‘Rally Cap,’ it’s for ages four to seven. ‘Grand Slam’ is eight and nine. And then there’s the 11U, which is 10-11, and so on with 13U, 15U, 18U, and then 21U and we also have, this year we started the 12U girls program through Baseball Manitoba.”
Associating with Baseball Manitoba would allow local associations to have insurance through the organization and players can potentially get involved with Manitoba provincial teams as well.
“Kenora, I think, has approximately 300 boys and girls playing,” Langlais said.
“Some of those players could be involved with our provincial teams and they’re full-fledged members of Baseball Manitoba and are provided insurance and official development, player development and coaching development.”
Langlais says the hope is to get a committee together locally that would form a District baseball association and be able to then form local programs in the different communities.
“I think there’s a great opportunity in the Rainy River District,” he said.
“Depending on the interest it could go from Rainy River all the way to Couchiching with Emo and Fort Frances in between.”
The organization is willing to help out anyone interested in teaming up with them to bring organized baseball to the area.
“You’ve got to look at what’s achievable in year one, and Baseball Manitoba staff would work very closely to kind of guide the volunteers in the area to get established and register and what are all the requirements and learn from others like Kenora about what’s working for them,” he said.
Langlais hopes that a group can be up and running for the next baseball season.
“Our hope is from these skill developments that there’s ongoing discussion fairly soon in the fall between Baseball Manitoba and the key volunteers about how to get established,” he said.
“Generally league registration would open up in February or March. So you want to be ready and established. So I would say it’s an opportune time to get established.”
Anyone interested in being involved with baseball at a local level can contact Chris Faragher by email at chrisfaragher-6@hotmail.com.
