The Red Deer Riggers are inching towards hosting the 2020 Baseball Canada Senior AAA Baseball Canada National Championships.
Earlier this summer, the Riggers expressed interest in hosting the event to Baseball Canada and are in the process of creating a bid, which needs to be submitted by Sept. 30.
The @RedDeerRiggers bid for hosting 2020 nationals is currently underway! @baseballcanada @reddeerbaseball @BaseballAlberta We are hoping to bring nationals home and showcase our amazing fields, city, and province! #rdnationals2020 #bringittoAB
— Red Deer Riggers (@RedDeerRiggers) September 12, 2018
“The bid is in the preliminary stages right now. You have to show you have interest two years before the event. We have to put together a package outlining the city, the facilities and we get letters from the mayor and Baseball Alberta,” said team representative Joel Peterman.
“I think it would be cool to bring this calibre of baseball back to Alberta.”
Red Deer also applied to host the 2019 national men’s championships but did not win the bid.
According to Baseball Canada, after the bids are submitted, the Championship Committee Host make recommendations by Oct. 21 and then at their fall convention in November, they officially select a host.
Alberta has not hosted Senior AAA Nationals since 1994 when the tournament was held in Red Deer.
Since 1969, the tournament has only been held in Alberta three times, two of those (1987 and 1994) were in Red Deer.
“We’re really excited. The upgrades they’ve made at the park, plus everything the city is gearing up for. We have a lot of things that we can start to offer,” Peterman said.
“I think we can make one of this one of the best nationals that we’ve seen.”
In 2017 and 2018, the national championships were held in Victoria, B.C. and will be in Chatham, N.B., in 2019.
Peterman added that with a deep roster of players who have experience at nationals, they understand what it will take to host the championships.
“We have many guys that have been involved at nationals for the last 10 years. Jason (Chatwood) and I were paying a bit more attention to how things were run behind the scenes. So we could get an idea about what we need to do to be successful and what they did well,” Peterman said.
“Our park would be perfect. Two fields back to back and get all the fans down there, it would be a lot of fun.”
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