Gunner Beetlestone has heard it enough times in his 15 years from people who sem to like to criticize his Prince George hometown.
It’s too cold. It’s too far away. It has an ugly downtown. Why would you want to live there?
Often when he does hear those comments, it’s out of the mouths of people who have never visited the city.
Beetlestone was born and raised in the city and he certainly has no inferiority complex.
As the catcher for the Zone 8 Cariboo-Northeast baseball team, Beetlestone is proud of the city he’s called home all his life and he's glad the city is hosting the 2022 BC Summer Games this weekend.
With nearly 3,000 athletes, coaches and officials participating and thousands more parents and family members making the trek to P.G., Beetlestone says they will get to see for themselves when they visit out sports facilities, walk our nature trails, check out the beauty of our surrounding lakes and rivers, and meet local residents that this is a great place to live.
“I think it’s great because it bring everybody here, and they get to see what we have here,” said Beetlestone. “We cleaned up our fields just for this and we want them to have a good opinion of the city. Everybody gives it a bad rap and we want them to see what P.G. like and the great people it has.”
He’s also thrilled to be playing baseball with his buddies on the city’s showcase ballfield at City Field, formerly known as Citizen Field. The bigger and wider field dimensions for BC Games call for two full-sized diamonds and that means 90-foot basepaths, 10 feet longer than that specified provincially for 15U teams.
“I played one week with the midget team on the same sized fields but I’ve never played here,” he said.
Although they are the home team representing Zone 8, Cariboo-Northeast will be bunking together overnight, sleeping a school classroom, just like the other seven teams in the BC Games tournament. That way, nobody has the advantage of fueling up on mom’s home cooking.
“This is a great group of guys -we have a lot of fun together and it’s a good experience for everybody,” said Beetlestone, the Cariboo-Northeast catcher. “We get to experience the full thing, staying at a school with everybody else from all the other cities. Everybody’s competitive but it’s going to be a lot of fun.
“We’ve been playing together since we were six or seven, most of us. We’ve been playing a long time and we’ve never really gotten to experience something like this, other than provincials. We’re facing levels way higher than us, so it will be good for us as a team.”
Beetlestone knows his team will be hard-pressed to win the Games tournament taking on the best players in the province, some of whom have already played 40 games this year. With no other rep team closer than a six-hour drive away, he and his teammates have been limited to 10 games so far.
As the Prince George Knights, the team played in 15U triple-A tournaments this summer in Kamloops (twice) and Kelowna to give the players a taste of the Premier Baseball League talent from Greater Vancouver, Vancouver Island and the Thompson-Okanagan they will face on the field this weekend. It also gave them a chance to use wood bats, the standard used in BC Games.
The timing of the Games tournament is ideal for the Knights, who will head south to play in the double-A provincial championship next weekend in Richmond.
“We have a great group and for the amount of weeks we get in a season compared to what some teams get, we’re just starting to come together now and we’re really looking forward to the weekend,” said Cariboo-Northeast head coach Derek Wood.
“One thing were trying to stress is have fun and enjoy the experience. Meet new people, meet new players, see new coaches and get as much as you can out of it.”
The 16-player Cariboo-Northeast team also includes Mitchal Heggelund, Hunter Henry, Ethan Hoff, Peyton Mackay, Linden Matovina, Kaleb Miller, Lyle Morgan, Lucas Peacock, Ezra Peters, Andrew Riddle, Joshua Stachoski, Brody Wood, all of Prince George, as well as two Quesnel players – Gavin Patterson and Dawson Ernst - and one from Fort St. John – Easton Goulet. Mike Mackay is the assistant coach.
They will lean on the pitching arms of Mackay, Patterson and Wood, but they have five others capable of chucking solid nnings. Mackay, Miller, Patterson and Beetlestone will be pencilled in near the top of the batting order.
Cariboo Northeast opens its schedule Friday at 11:15 at City Field against Kootenays. They also play Fraser River at 4:45 p.m. at City Field and will wrap up pool play on the same diamond Saturday at 8 a.m. against Vancouver-Coastal.
The top two teams in each pool advance to the championship playoff round. Semifinals will be played Saturday at 2 and 4:45 p.m. at City Field. The third and fourth-place finishers will drop into the consolation round for games Saturday at 2 and 4:45 p.m. at Rotary Field.
The bronze medal game is set for 8 a.m. Sunday at Rotary Field. City Field will host the gold-medal game Sunday starting at 8:30 a.m.
