By BRENT STUBBS

Chief Sports Editor

bstubbs@tribunemedia.net    

THEY didn’t win any games, but team manager Troy Feaste said his baseball team from Abaco will only get better from the experiences gained at the Bahamas Baseball Association’s 2024 Andre Rodgers Senior Baseball Championships.

Abaco was the only island outside of Grand Bahama who came to the capital to compete in the nationals that was played over the weekend at the Andre Rodgers Baseball Stadium and the Baillou Hills Sporting Complex. 

Feaste, a former radio sports show host who left New Providence in 2017 for Abaco, started to build the baseball programme in 2019 at the Patrick J Bethel School in Murphy Town.

He noted that it’s something new for the island, which prides itself on playing softball.

“They played baseball at a certain level, but when I got there, we wanted to move it to another level,” Feaste said. “Every year, we scrape a team to come to these tournaments.

“But we’re trying to develop a league where settlements get to play against settlements and we can look at putting the best players together to be able to represent the island.”

Feaste, however, said there’s been a lot of challenges and that is to get fathers and father-figures, especially those who have some knowledge of the game, to assist the programme.

“The biggest challenge after that is finances. The kids are there, the athletes are there, but we just don’t have the funding to sustain the programme,” he noted. “We’ve asked for people to assist, but only a few people have stepped forward to keep the programme afloat.

“We bring these kids here so that they can experience what it is like to play in this type of competition. In Abaco, we just play amongst ourselves on a softball field and it’s difficult to do it there because it is a softball field.”

He lauded persons like Pedro Williams, who came to Abaco from New Providence, and has been a tremendous help to the programme, along with Mr Henchell, who has a 15-year-old grandson who performs extremely well.

Despite their shortcomings against teams from Freedom Farm, Junior Baseball League of Nassau and Grand Bahama’s Legacy and Little League, Feaste said the team was still able to hold their own.

“Our boys who played in this tournament moved up from 14U to 16U and they are really good,” he said. “I think they can compete with any 16U boys in the country.

“But what we find out when we come to these tournaments is we are playing against All-Star teams that have been assembled where we just get home grown boys who didn’t get to play from T-ball up to the various divisions like they do in Freedom Farm and JBLN and Grand Bahama Little League and Legacy. “Some of our boys just started playing baseball last year and the most experience some of them would have had is about five years, but we will continue to develop them. We have a good crop of 10U boys and, in the next few years, you will hear about them as they continue to get better.”

When they get back to Abaco, Feaste said they will embark on a vigorous training programme in the gym to help strengthen the bodies of these young players so that when they step out on the field, they will be better prepared to hit the ball.

“Our boys are not defeated. The scores on the field are not reflective of how we played,” he said. “We made some fundamental errors and executions that went wrong. “So we have to work on our pitching and cutting down on the walks and the errors we made. We can’t afford to make those mistakes and still expect to be in the game.”

Feaste said the players have gotten a better appreciation of what they need to do to be successful and so he’s looking forward to them coming back in the future and being much better than they were this year.