Monday 27 July – The GB Slowpitch Team assembled over the past weekend in Dupnitsa, Bulgaria, and will be looking for its 10th straight win in the European Co-ed Slowpitch Championships when the tournament gets under way on Tuesday morning.
GB and traditional rivals Ireland will get things started with the opening game of the competition at 9.00 am Bulgarian time (7.00 am British time), and GB will also play Lithuania at 12.30 pm local time. The Opening Ceremony will be held at 6.00 pm, followed by a featured game between Bulgaria and the Czech Republic.
The teams will then play through a double round-robin, with a full Page Playoff and a fifth-place game scheduled for Saturday 1 August.
Six teams
One country, Lithuania, is making its first appearance in the European Slowpitch Championships, and the host team, Bulgaria, has entered for only the second time. Great Britain, Germany, Ireland, and the Czech Republic make up the rest of the six-team field.
The fact that countries like Slovenia and Austria have failed to attend this year is probably due in part to the fact that the European Slowpitch Championships are following immediately on the heels of the 20-team European Women’s Fastpitch Championships, which finished on Saturday 25 July in Rosmalen, Holland. Most of the women who might have played in Dupnitsa for these and other countries normally find that two tournaments in a row are difficult in terms of money, time off work, physical condition and the need to adjust from one format to another.
The British Softball Federation has already spoken to members of the ESF Executive about trying to find a separate timeframe for the European Slowpitch Championship and Super Cup that will keep them away from major fastpitch competitions. But given the increasingly crowded European calendar, this may not be so easy to do.
Meanwhile, in the absence of Slovenia, who have finished second in the last two European Slowpitch Championships, the strongest challenge to GB hegemony may come from Germany, many of whose players were on the UCE Travellers team that defeated both Chromies and H2O to win last year’s Slowpitch Super Cup.
There may also be a stronger than usual challenge from the Czech Republic, whose federation has pledged to try to put together stronger teams for slowpitch competitions.
Balanced squad
The squad selected at the end of April by GB Slowpitch Head Coach Steve Patterson and Assistant Coaches Mike Ashley and Sara Vertigan, is a balanced team of nine women and nine men:
WOMEN
Jenny Ball
Vicky Chapman
Emily Clifford
Areej Elmaazi
Katherine Golik
Kim Hendry
Liz Keaveney
Ruth Macintosh
Claudine Snape
MEN
Brad Gilmour
Danny Gunn
Steve Hazard
Ian Kulka
Dan Spinks
Ben Taylor
Aaron Thomas
Ed Watkinson
Chris Yoxall
This year’s team is much changed from the group that won GB’s ninth European Championship in 2013 in Pardubice in the Czech Republic, and five members of the team who played in the final of that tournament are not in this year’s selection.
The squad contains seven players who will be playing in a European Slowpitch Championship for the first time. Two of those players, Liz Keaveney and Aaron Thomas, entered the GB programme through the open trial process this past February and March. The other newcomers to the European Championships will be Chris Yoxall, Ed Watkinson, Brad Gilmour, Katherine Golik and Kim Hendry – though all of those players except Kim Hendry competed in the ISF Slowpitch World Cup in Florida in January 2014.
Katherine Golik will need to make a quick transition back to slowpitch after having played for the GB Women’s Fastpitch Team that finished fifth in the European Women’s Championships in Rosmalen.
History
This tournament is the 10th edition of a competition that began back in 1998 with just four countries competing, hosted by the British Softball Federation at Brunel University in Uxbridge.
Every subsequent European Slowpitch Championship has had at least five entries except for the 2004 competition in Linz, Austria. The highest number of entries – eight countries – came in the 2010 tournament in Prague. In recent years, six entries has been the norm.
Although normally held every two years, like other European Championships, the Slowpitch Euros were repeated in 2011 to help the ESF get a more even spread of championships in odd-numbered and even-numbered years.
The tournament has been hosted in six different countries over its 10 meetings, including this year’s event, with the Czech Republic hosting three times and the UK and Bulgaria twice each.
A total of 14 different countries have taken part, and the hope is to get more of them entering at the same time so the tournament can grow.
There are hopes of a major addition to the competition next time around, in 2017, when the Netherlands, who are sending a “national team” to the Softball World Series in London this September, will hopefully enter the European slowpitch arena for the first time.