Elks fielding a younger crew

By Lethbridge Herald on May 16, 2024.

Herald FILE photo Lethbridge American Legion Elks’ Ben Puszkar slides safe into home plate ahead of the tag from Absolute Human Performance’s catcher Jakob Reiniger during last season’s Mary Oikawa Memorial Baseball tournament.

The Lethbridge Elks American Legion AA baseball team  are going into this season with a younger roster after seeing more turnover in players from last year.

“It looks like a talented crew,” said Scott Oikawa, Elks head coach,  on the new roster make up.

“It is definitely a lot of new faces. We didn’t return a great deal of guys from last year but the young crew looks good.”

Oikawa was pleased with the tryouts.

“Numbers were up, so that’s always a good sign that baseball’s healthy here in Lethbridge, and definitely the quality of the kids coming up seems to be pretty solid,” said Oikawa.

“I think the program should be looking up for the next few years.”

The Elks gained a few players from last season’s  Lethbridge Miners team that went to the State championship in Montana.

“ Hopefully some of those guys can translate that to the double A level,” said Oikawa.

“It is a big jump but I think looking at the challenge and some of the competitive baseball these guys have played in the past, I think that should help them this year.”

Oikawa sees the Elks having success through a team concept.

“I thinks it’s going to be a fairly competitive atmosphere for some positions,” said Oikawa.

“I think that should definitely help some of these guys be ready to play each and every day.”

The Elks are only returning four guys from last year.

“We do have four quality guys coming back, and keeping that in mind, I think once again that young crew seems to be fitting well right now and I’m hoping we’ll built that team chemistry,” he said.

The Elks found out last season there was a lot of parity in the AA baseball  circuit they play in.

“So being ready to play conference games is just vital,” said Oikawa.

“I think some of our returning players have kind of figured that out and it’d seem that they’re   pretty eager to get back after some of those conference games.”

The team officially got the season underway last night with the start of the Vauxhall tournament.

“We always just kind of  take a look at these preseason games as being an opportunity to improve every day,” said Oikawa.

“It is a pretty highly competitive group of teams out here in Vauxhall. And so that should set us up pretty good for conference and we’ll see how we can compete against some quality arms that they have out here.”

The Elks will play a few weekends of exhibition games before opening conference play on June 8-9 at home against the Billings Scarletts.

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