You might have heard at some point about the crisis known as the “brain drain”. Canadian companies concerned about really smart home grown talent heading south of the 49th to work instead of staying home.
Well, Red Deer Minor Baseball is facing a “talent drain” these days.
“We’ve started losing players to academies,” said Randy Gehring, VP with Red Deer Minor Baseball. “Not so much that don’t play here for the season but even the kids who go to the academies who don’t play (there) over the summer, they don’t come back here until June.”
RDMB has seen some terrific growth over the past three years due in part to programs they’ve implemented with numbers climbing from the mid-three hundreds a few years ago to well over six hundred this year.
So now the goal is to give these kids the best opportunity to hone those skills over the years and a baseball academy in Red Deer is something which has been discussed recently.
One issue the local association faces is competing against teams in their own league which have kids from this region on their roster. These are for-profit baseball academies and that is a concern for centres under Baseball Alberta who operate the triple A performance teams in various locations.
“It’s going to be tough if for-profit entities start taking the best players from each of those places,” he said. “If we don’t get something of our own to keep the players here it’s going to be a problem for us but it’s going to be a problem for other centres as well.”
The Red Deer concept would be operated by one of the two school boards in the city and Gehring says they did get to the point where an instructor was being sought out and then it fell apart. But in the last couple of weeks he’s had conversations with people in order to revive the plan.
“Hopefully it’s going to get back on the table and we’ll try to get it moving forward again and get it launched in the next year or two.”
Gehring says there are about a half dozen baseball academies around Alberta with travelling teams but most release their players in June so they can play for teams in their hometown. There is one academy which doesn’t follow that model however. They train the players all winter long and then field a team in the provincial league to compete against RDMB.
He says the model RDMB supports would be a strictly skill development academy over the winter and then the players would stay here and play on the Red Deer teams in the spring and summer.
Keeping those talented players at home would make Red Deer more competitive and it will also help strengthen the program. Younger players will see these high calibre kids sticking with RDMB to sharpen their skills which in turn might keep young players around to do the same until they are done their minor baseball career, he said.
“I’m from a small town and I saw through hockey what happened to the small town hockey associations when kids started leaving to play triple A and double A in the late 70’s and early 80’s,” he said. “There are a lot of towns out there now that don’t have strong minor hockey associations because their kids have gone somewhere else to play and I would hate to have that happen with baseball.”
Gehring says he has no problem with local players spending the winter getting better through one of those academies. The best case scenario from his standpoint is having an academy in their own backyard at one of the schools where kids can go and get credits for working on their baseball skills just like they do with their hockey skills and we keep those kids around here for the summer time, he said.
“At the same time because those kids are working on their skills all winter long they’re going to be stronger and the organization as a whole will be stronger.”
Sounds like a pretty good return on an investment in some young athletes.
