The Brandon Peewee AAA Knights showed plenty of resiliency in their final two games of the UCT Canada Day Classic.
Late Sunday night, the Knights scored in an extra inning to reach Monday’s Division 3 consolation final. They followed that up with a walk-off single by Tate Popple to secure an 18-16 victory over Westman-based Oil Dome on Monday morning at Simplot Millennium Park. Brandon came into the bottom of the seventh inning down by a run.
Brandon head coach Grant Wilson said the come-from-behind victory stemmed from their win on Sunday.
“As I said before, a lot of it has to do with the mental side of the game,” he said. “It’s easy to accept losing when you continue to lose, but when you win you start to gain confidence and you start to believe in yourself and I definitely saw that in the course of the last two games for sure.”
Popple reached base four times in the consolation final and came around to score four runs. Max Paddock scored three times for Brandon and Sam Huston earned the win on the mound.
John Patmore took the loss for Oil Dome while Wade Thompson reached base four times and scored on each occasion. Jack Kirkup reached base five times and came around to score three times for Oil Dome.
The Peewee AAA Knights didn’t come into their home tournament with high expectations, but Wilson believes they are leaving it with a lot of confidence as they prepare for the provincial championship in Morden from Aug. 3-5.
“We understand we can compete with any of these teams on any given day if we come ready to play, play hard and do the little things,” he said. “Some days we’ll be in tough, but as I told the kids the day before, quit looking at the scoreboard and just worry about doing our job and when we do that we can have some success.”
In the Peewee Division 3 final, South Central doubled up the Westman-based Midwest squad 20-10. Ryan Heino reached base three times and scored once for Midwest, which gave up 13 runs in the first inning.
The St. James A’s claimed the Peewee AAA title with a 5-2 win over the Bonivital Blacksox in yesterday’s championship game.
» cjaster@brandonsun.com
Republished from the Brandon Sun print edition July 3, 2012
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