THUNDER BAY – For the last three years, the Canadian women’s national baseball team has played at Baseball Central or Port Arthur Stadium.
After facing the United States in the 2022 Friendship Series, the program hosted the 2023 World Baseball Softball Confederation Women’s Baseball World Cup Group A group stage event and this week’s main tournament.
According to Baseball Canada chief executive officer Jason Dickson, none of that could have happened without the support of the people of Thunder Bay.
“When Team Canada couldn’t go to the qualifier down in Venezuela in 2022, Thunder Bay agreed to host the next stage of qualifying for the final,” Dickson said. “If that doesn’t happen, this World Cup doesn’t happen for Canada.
“Thunder Bay’s contribution to this event has been amazing. The volunteers have been fantastic and the committee has been fantastic. It takes a lot of work to pull one of these events off and everyone here fully understood the commitment that's needed to make something like this happen.
“We can’t thank Thunder Bay enough for the job they have done. They’re definitely a part of Team Canada.”
This is the third time that the Women’s Baseball World Cup has been held in Canada. Edmonton hosted the inaugural tournament in 2004 and the fifth edition of the event in 2012.
Dickson, who pitched in Major League Baseball for the now-named Los Angeles Angels from 1996 to 2000, said the women’s game has grown a lot internationally over the last 20 years.
“I think a lot of people are pleasantly surprised when they come out and realize that the calibre is much higher than they expected,” Dickson said. “There are some fantastic athletes on these teams and this week has been a great example of that.
“While we’re focusing on the high-performance part of that with this event, we still really need to pay attention to the base level and get young female athletes involved in playing baseball.
“How do you go about doing that? You can expose people to something like this tournament, but there’s a lot of different avenues that we have to work on in different parts of the country.”
Dickson is in his third year as Baseball Canada’s CEO but has been a member of their executive since 2010.
When asked about the overall state of the sport in the country, Dickson said he’s very optimistic about how things are going.
“Our registration numbers are going up, which is the truest indicator of where things are at, but our volunteer coaches and our umpire numbers are also increasing post-COVID,” Dickson said.
“There were obviously some concerns coming out of the pandemic, but we’re still growing. I think people realized that they missed some of the things they liked to do, but we’re also getting a lot of new people trying baseball.”