Kids playing on a Burnaby baseball team spent five weeks getting “massacred” by their opponents this summer because of BC Minor Baseball Association rules one local mom thinks should have been applied more thoughtfully.
Valerie Duran’s 11-year-old son played on a U13 Burnaby Baseball Association A team during the spring season.
Because of an influx of players in the same age range, however, BC Minor Baseball Association rules led to the team being bumped up to the AA level for the summer season, according to Duran.
“The kids were neither prepared or trained, but, because it meant baseball or no baseball, they all agreed to sign up,” she told the NOW.
What followed was a bloodbath.
The team lost 12 of its 13 games with scores as lopsided as 0-35.
Their only win came thanks to a technicality, according to Duran.
“It was kind of like going into a battlefield unprepared and unarmed,” she said.
Duran said the experience was bad for the kids “emotionally and mentally.”
But she said BC Minor Baseball dismissed an appeal from the Burnaby Baseball Association at the beginning of the season to keep the team in A.
Duran also emailed the provincial association twice to complain, but her emails went unanswered until the season was over, she said.
See said the BC Minor Baseball official she emailed tracked her down at a recent tournament and told her he had agreed with her complaints.
“That’s kind of useless at this point,” Duran said.
Among the “core values” listed on the BC Minor Baseball Association’s website is that kids should “have fun playing baseball,” but Duran said this past summer season was not fun for her son.
She would like the association to be less “uncompromising” in enforcing its rules and to consider unique circumstances, such as the one her son’s team found itself in this year.
The NOW has reached out to the BC Minor Baseball Association and is waiting to hear back.
Follow Cornelia Naylor on Twitter @CorNaylor
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