West Island baseball team devastated after season is cut short

It was shaping up to be the perfect season for Nathan Van Aelst who plays pitcher and first base. 

The West Island Royals midget A team was 13 games in without a defeat and showing no signs of slowing down, but that high came crashing down in mid-July when coaches found out they were disqualified from the regional playoffs.

"We were taking it seriously, we were taking it well. It felt like nothing was really going wrong," he said, but gradually morale started taking a hit.

"You could tell game after game, practice after practice, how the energy and the will to win was diminishing," Van Aelst said. "Our hopes we're just not as high as before."

To be eligible for playoffs and championships Baseball Quebec requires one coach per team to take part in an annual training course to keep up with best practices, but this time around there was miscommunication about when the deadline was, head coach Alain Cloutier says.

"It's a pretty good idea," he said, it's just that in past seasons the deadline was typically later in the summer.

The June 25 deadline was already two weeks past just as they were sitting down to decide which of them would be listening in, Cloutier said, saying they never got the memo.

They're not the only coaching team that was out of the loop or forgot. Another 177 teams were also disqualified from this season's regional playoffs, Baseball Quebec confirmed Friday.

Cloutier takes responsibility for what happened, but says Baseball Quebec also needs to accept mistakes were made on their end as well.

At the end of the day coaches are volunteers, and it's the kids that pay the price.

"In the past the region has been a little bit more loose in terms of enforcing that deadline to make sure that the kids are able to