The Quality Foods Parksville Royals will be back in action once again this weekend. They will play host to the North Delta Blue Jays and North Shore Twins.
With four games on the slate through this weekend, the Royals will have played a grand total of 10 games within the span of seven days when the sun sets on Sunday evening. The Royals were in action yesterday against the Victoria Eagles (score not available at press time) and will be back at Inouye-Wallace Field on Saturday against the Blue Jays, first pitch going at 12:15 p.m.
“We’re going to be busy,” head coach Dave Wallace said at practice on Tuesday evening. “We’ll have played a lot of baseball in the span of a week, but it’s going to be nice to have our full roster back together after last weekend with everyone being away for graduation ceremonies.”
The short-handed Royals were able to win one out of the four games they played last weekend, and both coach Wallace and pitching coach Jim Seredick thought very highly of the way the team played while down a number of players.
“I thought they handled it very well,” Seredick said. “Being down players is never a fun thing to have, but we were able to play some very good baseball despite having that disadvantage. We’re happy with the way that things went, minus a couple of bad innings, but there were lots of positives to take away from last weekend.”
It’s going to be full steam ahead for the Royals now as the season is starting to wind down. With a dozen games left on the schedule, the Royals will have to win some ball games to make up ground in the standings if they are to make the playoffs. Currently sitting in last place in the B.C. Premier Baseball League, the Royals aren’t out of it but they know it’s a lot easier said than done.
“We’ve just got to find our game,” Wallace said. “I’ve been talking about consistency all season long and we’ve seen little glimpses of it here and there, but it’s never stayed for us just yet. We’ve been close, we’ve been very close, but close isn’t quite good enough. We need to put all the pieces together in order to start winning games and moving up the standings and unfortunately, we don’t have as much time as we’d like to do so. That being said, there still is time to make up ground, we just can’t afford to lose too many more games.”
The Royals will be playing the Twins on Sunday, which will double as games that will see a best two-out-of-three series between the two teams. The winning team will move on to the nationals for the Midget Championships.
The Royals and Twins are the only two teams in the BCPBL that are signed up for the tournament, so their league games will have a little extra meaning.
“It’s going to be fun,” Wallace said. “We’ve got a chance not only to make up ground but to get ourselves into a great tournament after our season is finished here as well.”