The Western Canadian Baseball League (WCBL) will be honouring its roots this summer with the inaugural Rural Roots Baseball Classic.
Part of the festivities on June 8 will include a regular-season game between the Lethbridge Bulls and the Sylvan Lake Gulls at Doug Lehman Field in Oyen, Alta.
Oyen was selected as the host for the inaugural Rural Roots Baseball Classic in celebration of the Oyen Pronghorns championship season in the Saskatchewan Major Baseball League (SMBL) in 1995.
The Pronghorns were the first team from Alberta to win a title in the SMBL, and opened the door for the Bulls to join the league in 1999, which transformed the circuit into the Western Major Baseball League (WMBL) in 2002, later rebranded to the WCBL in 2018.
"We are very excited for the Rural Roots Baseball Classic. This is our version of Major League Baseball's Field of Dreams game that they hold in Iowa," said WCBL President Kevin Kvame.
"We're going to try to move it around each year to a historical baseball location in our footprint and put on a regular-season WCBL game with two of our franchises. We're excited to start in Oyen with a big community festival that will salute the Pronghorns."
To this day, several ties between the Pronghorns, Bulls, and Gulls still exist.
President for the Sylvan Lake Gulls Aqil Samuel remembers his experience of being part of the Pronghorns.
"My two summers in Oyen were great. I was still in high school but got a chance to play in the Saskatchewan Major Baseball League. Oyen actually became a bit of a second home for me for years, and I still have some great friends in the area. To be part of this league all these years later is pretty special and I can't wait to go back," said Samuel.
"Bringing the Gulls back to Oyen to play the Bulls is going to be fun. Oyen is such a baseball town ... it is going to be a great atmosphere and I know it is going to be well supported by the entire community."
Also with the Gulls, founder and CEO Graham Schetzsel played first base on the 1995 championship team alongside Todd Hubka, who was the first head coach of the Bulls.
Other than the regular season game the weekend will include a full slate of activities.
Planned events include a golf tournament, barbeque, beer gardens, pancake breakfast, youth baseball camp, a 30th-anniversary reunion of the '95 Pronghorns team, a U13 game, and more which will be announced at a later date.
The first pitch of the game on June 8 at Doug Lehman Field is scheduled for 3:30 p.m.
Tickets for the Rural Roots Baseball Classic are available through the Bulls website, tickets.bullsbaseball.com.
