For the St Charles College Cardinals, anything short of a NOSSA Baseball championship would have been a stunning upset. Their dominant performance, not conceding a single run across four games against Collège Notre-Dame Alouettes (twice), Lockerby Vikings, and Horizon Aigles, indicates that the team is well-prepared for their upcoming OFSAA appearance in Whitby next week.
“When you are expected to win, it brings its own set of challenges,” acknowledged SCC baseball coach Jean-Gilles Larocque. “It now becomes a matter of keeping guys engaged, keeping guys composed, playing the right way, doing the right things. Our pitching was really good; we’re fairly deep.”
“And defensively, we were super clean,” he added. “We had no fielding errors and our two throwing errors were on double play turns. Brody Mabbott made an amazing play in centerfield to double up a player at second base that would have been a run, for sure.”
As the leader of the Sudbury Voyageurs rep baseball program, Larocque is well aware that the level of high-school competition locally does not match what his players will face in the Premier Baseball League of Ontario (PBLO) this summer. Nonetheless, he insists on a professional approach to each at-bat.
“We talked about making adjustments – moving up in the batter’s box, for instance,” he said. “You have to stay within yourself. You have players swinging at lower pitches, swinging at higher pitches because they want an opportunity to see decent pitches. You don’t want to build bad habits when you are going right back into league play.”
The Cardinals roster set to compete at OFSAA includes Logan Vaillancourt, Ethan Thompson, Alex Marshfield, Joe Gouchie, Brody Mabbott, Gabriel Larocque, Hudson Fletcher, Jack Barber, Nicolas Signorile, Braiden Paul, Carter Baron, Brett Rienguette, Logan West, Will Arsenault, Owen Lamothe, Colton Nowoselsky, Chris St Germain, and Devon Madore.