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Youth baseball players converge
By ROD KNIGHT
The South African Baseball Union has, for the first time in their 102-year history brought together all the youth of the nation to compete in one tournament.
Easterns Baseball Association are hosting the tournament this week – for 42 teams each consisting of 20 players at the Cardinals Baseball Club at the Boksburg Stadium grounds – thanks to the involvement of the Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Municipality who have supported this tournament from the start.
Sides from Under-14 through to u-18 usually play their annual championships in different provinces at the same time, but this is the first time they are all together in one place at one time.
Vice-president of the union Angelo Couvaras tells of the time when he first played baseball in the senior section in 1954.
“There were always two governing bodies but in 1992 both bodies came together and formed one governing body and this union decided to take their sport into the schools and this is how the sport has grown,” said Couvaras.
Another powerful man on the governing body who is willing to talk about baseball to anyone willing to listen is the union’s chief executive Edwin Bennett.
Bennett said: “With the impetus of the growth among the coloured community in the Cape, the sport now has 370 000 players throughout the country”.
The secret of their success is that they work as one body in both the senior and school levels.
“This is the success of our union. We do not have two sections but one and we work together which makes life so much easier for all,” said youth commissioner Roderick Siljeur.
–rodk@citizen.co.za
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