The Quality Foods Parksville Royals are looking forward to the start of the regular baseball season in just a few weeks.
The B.C. Premier League season kicks off for the Royals April 12 with a game against the Victoria Eagles in Victoria. The following weekend the Royals will have their home opener (April 18) against the Abbotsford Cardinals and then host the Victoria Mariners on April 19.
In total, the Royals have six of their first nine games in April on their home Inouye-Wallace Field.
“We’re pretty lucky to start the season off that way,” head coach Dave Wallace said. “But we need to make sure that we can also get off to a good start with all those home games. It’s a good chance for us to really get our feet under us to start the season off and we’ll be looking to get some early wins under our belt.”
The wins were hard to come by last season for the Royals, who had a record of 13 wins and 33 losses. With the majority of last season’s roster back, Wallace is optimistic.
“We’ve got a good chunk of returnees from last season,” Wallace said. “We’re an older team, that’s for sure. Last season we had a bit of a hard time in games and things are going to be different for us this season. All of the players are coming back a year older, with that much more experience and they’ve gotten bigger and stronger too.”
With just 17 players this season, each will get more playing time.
“In a way, it’s nice for us,” Wallace said. “We don’t have to worry about finding game time for so many kids and I think that the players really like that. Of course, there’s the downside where if we have to deal with injuries, we don’t have the numbers to fill in the spots. So we hope that we can stay relatively healthy over the course of the season. It’ll be nice for our younger players on the team to be able to get a good number of innings in, that’s for sure.”
Wallace will look to players like Errington’s Liam Ballance, Ethan Fox (Comox), Owen Kelly (Nanaimo), Colton Tuka (Courtenay) and Jaret Knowles (Campbell River) to help lead the team this season.
“We’ll have strong pitching, defense and hitting,” Wallace said. “Our corner infielders (Ballance and Knowles) will be solid, as will pitchers Owen Kelly and Colton Tuka. Kelly threw the ball good last season, Fox was one of the top hitters in the league, so we’re hoping to see more of that production this season. We’ve got good strength right through our roster and I’m really looking forward to seeing what this season brings.”
