Canadian women’s baseball team honours late longtime player during Friendship Series against USA
This week, the Canadian girls’s nationwide baseball workforce is enjoying its first video games in opposition to a world workforce in three years with heavy hearts.
Canada and the USA are competing in a five-game Girls’s Baseball Friendship Collection, which started Thursday and ends Monday at Baseball Central in Thunder Bay, Ont.
It marks the primary aggressive sequence for Workforce Canada since 2019 as a result of pandemic, however a well-known face is lacking.
Amanda Asay, one of many longest-tenured members of the nationwide workforce, died in a snowboarding accident in January at age 33.
- WATCH | Canada supervisor Ashley Stephenson remembers buddy Amanda Asay:
Workforce Canada girls’s baseball is enjoying in Thunder Bay, Ont., this weekend, and their enjoying in honour of their buddy and former teammate Amanda Asay, who died earlier this 12 months.
Ashley Stephenson, who made her debut this week as Workforce Canada’s supervisor, took to the diamond alongside Asay for 14 years throughout her enjoying profession after which coached her the final couple of years.
“Amanda was an excellent buddy of mine. She was in all probability the most effective teammate I ever had. Unbelievable competitor — she was our chief, our captain,” Stephenson mentioned, struggling to carry again tears, after a workforce apply earlier than the beginning of the sequence.
“That is the primary 12 months we have not had her with us since 2005, [when] she began. So it will be an emotional time for our group. She was a competitor and we’re going to ensure we play the suitable approach for her.”
Asay was acknowledged earlier than the beginning of Sport 1 on Thursday with a second of silence, and her dad and mom — Loris and George — had been welcomed onto the sector.
The Canadian gamers are sporting a particular patch on their proper sleeve with the phrase Ace — Asay’s nickname — and her No. 19. The nationwide girls’s workforce retired the quantity earlier this 12 months. The gamers all sport No. 19 on their apply shirts.
Each a pitcher and first-base participant, Asay joined the nationwide workforce in 2005. She was a five-time Girls’s Baseball World Cup medallist, enjoying for the Canadian groups that gained silver in 2008 and 2016, and claimed bronze in 2006, 2012 and 2018.
Asay was additionally a key member of the Canadian workforce that earned silver on the 2015 Pan Am Video games in Toronto, the primary time girls’s baseball was included in main multi-sport video games.
Asay was acknowledged twice because the nationwide workforce’s most precious participant, receiving the honour in 2006 and 2016.
Claire Eccles, an outfielder and pitcher from Surrey, B.C., has spent eight years on the nationwide workforce — all of them, up till now, with Asay.
“She was a large, large a part of the workforce,” Eccles mentioned. “There’s positively a void there. I’ve performed along with her since I used to be 16 and first made the workforce. I’ve by no means stepped on the sector with out her.
“I feel all of us have her in our hearts. We’re positively enjoying for her this 12 months. She deserves to be honoured for all the pieces she’s executed.”
- WATCH | Claire Eccles says Amanda Asay is within the workforce’s coronary heart:
Claire Eccles says shedding Amanda leaves a ‘large void’ on the workforce as Workforce Canada gears as much as play the USA on the girls’s friendship sequence in Thunder Bay.
Zoe Hicks, who performs third base, can be in Thunder Bay and making her first look with the Canadian nationwide workforce.
She mentioned whereas she did not personally know Asay, her legacy and presence are nonetheless felt all through this system.
“She simply confirmed everybody methods to go about all the pieces. How she did all the pieces was how she did something,” Hicks mentioned. “She represented Canada in the easiest way. On the sector, off the sector, low season, on season, she was all the time the toughest employee asking the suitable questions.
“She was simply inspiring to everybody.”
- WATCH | Zoe Hicks says Amanda Asay was inspiring:
Zoe Hicks is new to Workforce Canada girls’s baseball, however says her legacy remains to be felt as they start their exhibition sequence in opposition to Workforce USA.
