For 13-year-old Jayan Nickolet, there was no other option.
With no baseball team in her hometown of Mackenzie, she found a second home playing with the boys in the peewee division of the Prince George Youth Baseball Association.
For two months, from the start of the season until the end of school in mid-June, that meant three return trips per week from Mackenzie to Prince George, just so she and her brother could pursue their love of the game. Complicating the situation was the fact Jayan's games were on Mondays and Wednesdays, while her 14-year-old brother Ajay played bantam baseball on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
"We don't have enough people in Mackenzie for a team," said Jayan. "I've been on that highway a lot."
But all those kilometres driven by her mom Angie and father Jade paid off in the end for the Nickolet kids. Ajay made the bantam Knights all-star team and Jayan cracked the roster of the B.C. Selects girls squad - the team's only player from north of Kelowna.
Once school ended, both kids started living with their Prince George grandparents, Gladys and Roger Nickolet, and that made it a breeze getting to the ballpark for games and practices.
Now in her second season of organized baseball, Jayan is in Spruce Grove, Alta., where she and her B.C. teammates will face Saskatchewan today in their opening game at the Western Canadian peewee girls championship.
"I think we're going to win, we 're a good team," said Jayan, a shortstop/pitcher. "We have pretty good defence and I think we have some strong pitchers. We have some strong hitters and some who are not so strong, but they're smart."
This is Jayan's second kick at the Western Canadian crown. She played last season for the Okanagan Halos, who finished third in the tournament.
"It is cool playing against different girl teams," she said. "We had a good team [last year], but there was one team that was way better than everyone else [the Vancouver-based B.C. Selects].
"I think we're a stronger hitting team than the Halos were."
Jayan, a straight-A student, would love to follow a similar basepath as Amanda Asay, who grew up in Prince George playing baseball with the boys and used her talents to attract an Ivy League scholarship at Brown University. Jayan has no idea what her batting average was this season but she does remember blasting a home run over the fence at Gyro Park. While several boys equaled that feat this summer, Jayan is believed to be the only girl to ever do that at Gyro. She certainly has family bragging rights; neither Ajay nor her dad Jade, a former all-star youth player, ever went yard ay Gyro.
"I'm good [at hitting], I don't strike out much," Jayan said.
Ajay played for the Prince George Lomak bantam Knights two weekends ago in the double-A provincial championship in Burnaby and helped them win the silver medal. The Knights went 3-1 in round-robin play, then lost in the final to Aldergrove.
The Prince George Strike Zone peewee Knights, a select team from the peewee house league Nickolet played in this year, finished with a 1-3 record at the double-A provincial championship two weekends ago in Port Coquitlam. Two of the losses for the ninth-ranked Knights were by the slimmest of margins, playing in a pool that included the two provincial finalists - the Chilliwack Cougars and Duncan River Rats. Duncan won the final and will represent B.C. at the Western Canadian championship in Swift Current, Sask.
The Knights players are Nolan Minck, Brady Pratt, Soren Erricson, Kaelon Gibbs, Jacob Anker, Dryden Howse, Richard French, Derian Potskin, Jaedyn Johnson, Tommy Kreitz, Zach Schwab and Kolby Lukinchuk. Buck Schmidt, Hans Minck, Russ Pratt and Brad Kreitz are the coaches.
