Alberta Dugout Stories: The Podcast

There aren’t many hats Les McTavish hasn’t warn in Southern Alberta baseball. From a young athlete to playing at Prairie Baseball Academy over to Washington State University to some time with the Oyen Pronghorns and Lethbridge Bulls before heading to coaching with the American Legion Lethbridge Elks, the PBA, Team Alberta, the Bulls, the Canadian Junior National Team and now with the Vauxhall Academy of Baseball. He’s also served with the Alberta Amateur Baseball Council and has been an area scout for the Seattle Mariners. Clearly, no shortage of things to talk about when it comes to his journey, but also about how the game has changed in the last 20+ years and about life coming full circle as he watches his kids play sports.

Calgary’s Geoff Freeborn has made a name for himself in a variety of ways, breaking onto the scene with the hometown Vipers between 2006 and 2008, including an All Star calibre season. He went onto spend years traveling around the world, then coaching, leading to a profile we wrote on him a little more than three years ago. We hadn’t had him on the podcast yet, so this seemed like a great opportunity to catch up on his coaching, his golf game and on SideArm Nation.

The COVID-19 pandemic has left many bats on shoulders around this province, as athletes, coaches and everyone else involved the game are relegated to their garages and basements, waiting to maybe get to train again in familiar facilities. Add in this blast from Old Man Winter and those quarters have been tight lately. So it was welcome news to see some training resume on Monday and many were chomping at the bit to get going. Among them was Tyler Hollick. The Okotoks Dawgs and Dawgs Academy general manager has had to oversee a very quiet Seaman Stadium area over the last several months, but hopefully that can come to an end this spring. So last week, we connected with Hollick for an in-depth chat about growing up in the Dawgs system, moving onto Chandler-Gilbert Community College and then the San Francisco Giants organization before ultimately returning home.

The Florida Gators are one of the top-ranked NCAA teams heading into the spring and one of the people leading the charge from the bench is from our province. Lars Davis grew up in Grande Prairie, went to Prairie Baseball Academy and was drafted by the Tampa Bay Rays in 2003 and the Colorado Rockies in 2007. That led to an eight-year professional career before he landed with the Gators as their volunteer coach, where he's been since 2014. In this episode, we chat with Davis about his baseball journey, what it means to him to have stayed involved in the game as long as he has, and getting to play with some future stars like new St. Louis Cardinals third baseman Nolan Arenado.

Before we took our winter break, the college commitment announcements were coming in fast and furious. We spent a little time getting to know some of those young athletes and we thought we’d continue that heading into the new year. On this week's edition of Alberta Dugout Stories: The Podcast, we introduce you to Connor Crowson and Ryan Ludwig. Crowson is an Okotoks product who came up through the hometown Dawgs Academy program, starting with being part of the original peewee program and has excelled in appearances at nationals and the T12 tournament in Toronto. Ludwig is an Edmonton native who came up through the Confederation Park Little League program and has been working with former MLBer Mike Johnson and others with Northern Alberta Xtreme. Crowson is heading to Bossier Parish Community College while Ludwig has committed to Fairleigh Dickinson University.

It might have been a small sample size, but 2020 was shaping up to be quite a year for many of Alberta’s baseball players who were taking the field in American colleges. Teams were lucky to get in 20 games before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, but they were being treated to some fantastic outings by athletes from our province. That led to us combing through the stats reports to come up with our 2020 Alberta All-College Team. We chat with Edmonton's Aidan Huggins (Illinois State) and Airdrie's Evan Wilde (Cloud County) in the latest installment of Alberta Dugout Stories: The Podcast, as both were selected for our team.

Merry Belated Christmas and Happy New Year! Welcome to the new season of #ADSPodcast! In our first episode of the new season, we chat with the newly-minted mental health and mindset coach of Dawgs Academy in Okotoks, Laura Redgate. She owns Baseline Therapy and works with athletes and others in hopes of ending the stigma around mental health in sport. And while we spent a lot of time talking about it from a baseball perspective, this episode can be also be translated to everyday life with things like New Year's resolutions and the COVID-19 pandemic still hanging over our heads.

Baseball Santa stops by to read a new spin on the classic "Twas the Night Before Christmas." From our dugouts to yours, we wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a home run of a year in 2021!

It’s been a year, hasn’t it? Well, 2020 certainly didn’t work out the way anyone would have guessed when January started and we are certainly in that same boat. Right around now, we’re usually doing stories on Baseball Alberta award winners and maybe doing a quick “season in review” with a few of the pros. But none of those things happened. However, Ian and Joe sit down to talk about the year that was, the year to come and the decision to take a few weeks off with the podcast to get caught up on a few things, including what's most important in life.

We have been lucky enough to share some of the stories of Alberta's baseball players announcing their commitments to post-secondary institutions stateside recently. This one has a bit of a twist, in that on the same day Jonah Arseneau of the Calgary Bucks announced he had verbally committed to Minot State University, he was also named to New Zealand's U18 National Team. So how does a kid from Calgary end up on that squad? He was born there and spent the first nine months of his life in New Zealand before his family moved to Canada, settling in Alberta a few years later. We talked about that journey and more with the 6-foot-2, 165-pound pitcher and outfielder.

August 1, 2019 will be a date forever etched not only on the mind of Shaun Atamanchuk, but also through the scars on his arm. That's the date the Beaumont native went under the knife for Tommy John Surgery. The last year has been a challenging one for the 6-foot-4 right-hander, who took to Instagram to document the journey for not only himself, but for those having to go through the same recovery. We caught up with the Dawgs Academy grad to talk about that, as well as his move to Georgia Gwinnett College, where he will be reunited with former Dawgs coach Allen Cox.

There have been a number of Alberta-based baseball players making their college commitment announcements recently and so we wanted to catch up with some of those athletes. On this week's edition of the podcast, we caught up with two from Dawgs Academy in Okotoks. Simon Lusignan's story is an interesting one, being from Quebec and having to better his English while also bettering his pitching skills. We talk to him about that, being ranked one of the best players in the country and his commitment to Stetson University. Then we visit with Strathmore's Kaden Zarowny. The catcher-turned-outfielder has skyrocketed up the Dawgs Academy depth charts and recently announced he will be joining a few teammates at Crowder College.