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Muskoka Hornets Season Goes Into Extra Innings

By Admin, 09/21/17, 4:15PM EDT

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In seasons past, the Muskoka Hornets program would be busy throughout the summer with house league games, hosting tournaments and managing four or five travel teams as these teams compete across the province of Ontario and in the United  States.  Typically,  this activity would wind down by Labour Day and then the locks would be placed on the Muskoka Hornets bunker until the following Spring.

This year, the Hornets program decided that baseball season would not end when the kids went back to school,  perhaps  in part  because we felt there  was no summer of 2017.  Instead, the program continues with a busy schedule of fall events including try outs for all of next year's travel teams,  a free coaching clinic on September 24 as well as 15 plus exhibition and tournament games for the U18 Midget Elite team.   Add to this the continued work installing a batting cage at McCulley and Hornets volunteers are continuing to be run off their feet.

For the Midget Hornets, the first order of business was solidifying its roster for 2018.  To this end, the team held try outs in August and arrived at a final  roster of  16 players for next year.  The team played several exhibition games already this fall as well  as one tournament, making the finals in the Smith Brothers fall ball  bash last weekend in Barrie.  The Midgets will continue game play until  mid October and practice outdoors until the snow falls  before moving indoors in January.

On Saturday,  September 23, the Midgets will host a three team round robin tournament with Ajax and Oshawa at McCulley Diamond F in Huntsville starting at 10 am.  At 12 noon, the three  tournament teams will compete in a skills competition and the tourney wraps up with finals starting at 7 pm.  

On Sunday,  September 24 starting at 9 am,  Ryan Davis and the coaching professionals  at  Edge  Baseball  Training will  put existing and prospective Hornets  coaches through a 4 hour training program on basic and advanced coaching techniques for  baseball.  The coaching course, sponsored and paid  for  by the Hornets, is  designed to help our volunteer coaches with baseball  knowledge that will improve the quality of the coaching in our program.  New  prospective coaches are welcome to attend the clinic at Gull  Lake diamonds free of charge - see story on home page for details.

We expect to continue with more coaching and player development events in the coming months as it  is  important to  focus on teaching at the grass roots level of baseball.

At some point the season of 2017 baseball will  end,  but for local baseball enthusiasts in the Hornets program, there seems to be a will to see several extra innings of play.