After years of being a devoted hockey player, Sylvan Lake athlete Miles Lagoutte decided to pick up a baseball – and it recently earned him a full athletic scholarship to play baseball for St. Clair College in Windsor, Ont.
Lagoutte, 19, didn’t start playing baseball until he was 12 years old. He explained he had been playing summer hockey, but when he was 12 he was cut from the team.
“So I thought I’d try something new,” Lagoutte said. And he hasn’t looked back.
“I like everything about it,” Lagoutte said of playing baseball. “I would say it’s a lot nicer than being in the cold. And there’s a lot more personality to it, I think. You can express yourself more.”
Lagoutte recently wrapped up the season with the Sylvan Lake Mariners U18 AA team, where he played pitcher and first baseman.
“I love being the pitcher,” he said, adding that he started pitching when he was about 14 years old. “It’s like being the star of the show.”
Lagoutte did continue to play hockey during the winter months, but he quit hockey when he was 17 so he could focus solely on baseball.
When asked how the offer to play college baseball had come about, Lagoutte explained he had been working with a coach at The Dome in Red Deer, and they began taking training videos and posting them to the FieldLevel app, where scouts can view the videos. He received six scholarship offers from various schools and he thought he had decided to go to Edmonton, but then St. Clair College had come along.
“I liked everything they had to offer,” Lagoutte said of St. Clair, explaining that he would continue with the college team as a pitcher and first baseman. “It seemed like they have had a lot of success in baseball, so I decided to sign with them.”
In addition to his athletic scholarship, Lagoutte will also receive a partial academic scholarship if he keeps his grades over 75 per cent. He’s decided to pursue business marketing at St. Clair, with the goal to one day get into insurance.
But as for baseball, college isn’t the end of Lagoutte’s dreams.
“I’d love to play overseas,” he said. “But if that doesn’t work out, I still want to stay in the game, maybe get a coaching gig somewhere.”