The 3rd ISF Slowpitch World Cup will begin on Thursday 23 January in Plant City, Florida, and the GB Slowpitch Team will spend the early part of the week getting acclimatised and getting ready.
Head Coach Steve Patterson is taking a full squad of 18 players to Florida – nine women and nine men – but not many of them were front-line starters in Pardubice last summer when the GB Team easily won its ninth European Championship. A number of the players who are travelling to the States only joined the GB programme following trials last September, and many veteran players have been unable to make the trip.
Practice and warm-up
So the GB Team will lack a certain amount of international experience, and many of the players will not have spent much time playing together.
The team will attempt to overcome some of these obstacles when they take part in a tournament in Florida on Sunday and a scrimmage game Tuesday evening against local opposition, interwoven with training sessions on Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon at the ISF complex in Plant City where the World Cup will begin on Thursday morning.
Full round-robin
Eight teams are taking part in the competition:
GB
Canada
Turks & Caicos Islands
Curacao
France
Bulgaria
USA Fort Walton Beach
USA Ink Daddyz
The tournament format will be a single round-robin involving all eight teams, followed by a double Page Playoff in which the bottom four teams in the round-robin standings will enter the playoffs on a single-elimination basis while the top four teams will have the security of double elimination.
The Bronze Medal game will be played at 9.00 local time on Sunday 26 January, with the Gold Medal game at noon.
Schedule
GB will have an early and challenging start to the tournament, with a game against Canada at 9.00 am on Thursday 23 January.
The first day of the tournament will be by far the heaviest day for GB, who will play France at 1.30 pm and then have back-to-back games against Curacao at 4.30 and USA Fort Walton Beach at 6.00 pm.
While GB may feel fairly confident against the French, the three other teams they will meet on Thursday are all unknown quantities, and these games will go a long way to determining where GB will finish in the round-robin standings.
On Friday 24 January, GB will play Bulgaria at noon and will then have a gap before taking on USA Ink Daddyz at 6.00 pm.
The final round-robin game for GB will be at 10.30 am on Saturday 25 January against the Turks and Caicos Islands, with the Page Playoffs beginning that afternoon at 3.00 pm.
You can follow the progress of the GB Team through daily reports on the BSF website, as well as on Twitter and Facebook.
The squad
One of two GB teams won the inaugural Slowpitch World Cup played in Plant City in 2002, and a British pick-up team, The Clan, won the second competition in 2005.
The squad that will try to make sure the third trophy will also come back to Britain is as follows:
Women
Lucy Binding
Emily Clifford
Areej Elmaazi
Katherine Golik
Gelske Huyer
Kirstie Leach
Chloe Llewelyn
Ruth Macintosh
Claudine Snape
Men
Richie Browne
Brad Gilmour
Adam Haywood
Ian Kulka
David Lee
Ben Taylor
Ed Watkinson
Michael Williams
Chris Yoxall
Staff
Steve Patterson (Head Coach)
Martin Cartledge (Assistant Coach)
Mike Ashley (Assistant Coach)
Sara Vertigan (Team Manager)