After eight years of softball, Ella Duncan-Reda decided to try something different this past summer, and it turned out to be a golden opportunity.
Having never played baseball before, Duncan-Reda tried out for the Team BC Girls Selects 14U baseball team in June. She made the cut, and at the end of the summer, came home to Duncan with a gold medal from the Western Canadian Championships.
The sports may be similar, but there is definitely an adjustment from softball to baseball. That’s especially true for a catcher like Duncan-Reda.
“The baseball is a way smaller ball,” she pointed out. “As a catcher I had to adjust to catching a 12-inch ball pitched underhand to a nine-inch ball that’s pitched overhand, but also can come in on a curve.
“The hitting was also much different because the path of the ball was different.”
During her Grade 8 year, Duncan-Reda trained two days a week with the junior softball academy at Lambrick Park Secondary in Saanich. In May, coach Mitch Davidoff suggested that she should try out for the provincial team.
“I trained June and July in Surrey with the 16U provincial team,” Duncan-Reda recalled. “I was 13 and the youngest. From there, coach Stacy [Fournier] selected me to her 14U provincial team where I was starting catcher. I had only been playing baseball for three months.”
More than 100 girls tried out for the 14U team, and only 14 made the final cut, including three from Vancouver Island, who hadn’t met prior to trying out for the provincial team. Joining Duncan-Reda on the team were Tess Sawkins of Victoria and Grace Gonyer of Nanaimo. Sawkins, who is the only girl on the Premier Baseball League’s Victoria Mariners, was Team BC’s pitching ace and was named Top Defensive Player at the Western Canadians. Gonyer is the only girl on the PBL’s Nanaimo Pirates.
The 14U team practiced together just four times between selections in late July and leaving for the Western Canadian tournament in Spruce Grove, Alberta, in mid-August. Team BC went undefeated in five games, out-scoring their opponents — Manitoba, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Ontario — 79 runs to 18. Duncan-Reda was named game MVP against Ontario after hitting a 260-foot triple and a pair of singles. She finished with a .636 batting average.
“There was some amazing talent out there,” Duncan-Reda said. “Team BC was the strongest. Essentially we are the top team in Canada for this age group.”
The Western Canadian tournament was farther than Duncan-Reda had ever gone in softball.
“I have been on teams that have made provincial championships,” she said. “But the level of softball played on the Mainland is much higher calibre than our district.”
Duncan-Reda is now continuing in both sports. She is playing fall ball with the Cowichan Valley Mustangs bantam program, and will play softball for Lakehill next spring and summer.
Also this fall, she started a daily commute to Lambrick Park, where she is enrolled full-time in the school’s softball academy.
“My goal is to excel in their academics and athletics programs, and move on to play college or university ball on a scholarship to further my education,” Duncan-Reda said.
Any advancement at that level is likely to be in softball, however.
“There doesn’t seem to be any opportunities for girls to get scholarships for baseball,” Duncan-Reda noted. “There are lots of scholarships for boys in baseball, but not girls. It would be nice to try and change the stigma that baseball is for boys, softball for girls.”
kevin.rothbauer@cowichanvalleycitizen.comLike us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter
