LAC LA BICHE - Close to 100 recreational ball players from around the Lakeland Region and beyond participated in Twigge’s Draft Tournament, which took place Sept. 23-24 at the Bold Centre Ball Diamonds.
The fun-filled competition, which over the weekend celebrated its second year, was started by Lac La Biche County resident Stefan Twigge, who, inspired by a similar type of tournament held annually in Cold Lake, decided to organize one a bit closer to home.
The theme of the inaugural Twigge’s Draft Tournament was Pokémon. In its second year, the 96 players — grouped into eight teams in four pools for the round robin tourney — paid homage to the Nintendo video game Super Mario Bros, naming their teams after popular characters in the franchise and wearing colourful and zany uniforms while facing each other on the diamond.
On Friday, in an event designed to replicate a real-life baseball draft, the players assembled at Mo’s Billiards in Lac La Biche to learn which teams they would be playing on over the weekend, with team captains choosing their rosters.
Twigge’s Draft Tournament is not a fundraiser, and the winning team doesn’t receive any monetary prizes, but instead winners take home a jersey from the event and are given the right to decide the theme for the following year’s competition.