VANCOUVER — The Port Angeles Lefties will gain a second nearby rival on Vancouver Island beginning in 2021.
The West Coast League is adding a third Canadian team beginning in 2021 in Nanaimo, B.C., joining Victoria and Kelowna as Canadian franchises in the league. The new franchise will play its home games at Serauxmen Stadium.
Last year, the WCL added a team in Ridgefield and the year before that a Portland, Ore., team joined the league.
The Port Angeles Lefties began play in the WCL in 2017 and will enter their fourth year in the league this June. The WCL is a wooden bat baseball league that features college baseball players looking to get drafted by MLB teams, much like the famous Cape Cod League and the Northern League in Minnesota and Wisconsin.
The WCL is currently a 12-team league with teams in Port Angeles, Victoria, Kelowna, Wenatchee, Yakima, Walla Walla, Bellingham, Cowlitz County (Longview), Ridgefield, Portland, Ore., Corvallis, Ore., and Bend, Ore.
The new team, located in a city of about 90,000 about 60 miles north of Victoria, will be owned by the same company that has successfully operated the Victoria HarbourCats at Wilson’s Group Stadium at Royal Athletic Park. That group took over the team, which debuted in the WCL in 2013, in the late spring of 2015, with ownership including John Wilson (of Wilson’s Transportation), Richard Harder, and brothers Ken and Jim Swanson. Jim Swanson is the Managing Partner and will oversee operations in both Nanaimo and Victoria.
“We’re thrilled in Port Angeles with the addition of a WCL team in Nanaimo,” said Port Angeles Lefties owner Matt Acker. “I’ve been lucky to visit Nanaimo with Jim Swanson when this was just a thought. You can definitely can see the potential in the stadium and I was really impressed with the local officials. Nanaimo’s proximity to Port Angeles is also a plus for us. There are a lot of similarities in our communities. We have the utmost confidence in the ownership who has proven themselves as first-class owners in Victoria and we are looking forward to a future rivalry.”
“When I visited Nanaimo two years ago, I fell in love with both Serauxmen Stadium and the city itself,” said WCL Commissioner Rob Neyer. “As both Commissioner of the West Coast League and just a devoted baseball fan, I’m looking forward to many summers of top-flight baseball in The Harbour City.”
“Creating a baseball organization from whole cloth is never easy. But this ownership group and management team have proved in Victoria-proved many times over, actually-that they know exactly how to build not just an organization, but a winning organization on Vancouver Island. I have every expectation that Nanaimo’s new team will rank with Victoria among the league’s jewels.”
“This is an exciting day for us all. This has been in the works for a few years and it’s going to be a great new addition to the Nanaimo sports scene,” said John Wilson, the team’s Vice-President/Business, whose Wilson’s Group of Companies has operations based in both Nanaimo and Victoria, serving the entire Island.
“The successful program that has been built in Victoria will now have an Island rival, to go along with the other natural rivalries already in place with, in particular, Port Angeles, Kelowna and Bellingham. Fans from Mid-Island area know we’ve had many Island players, remembering the stellar play of Griffin Andreychuk, Adam McKillican, Alex Rogers, Garrett Goodall and others, and the level of baseball will be the highest Nanaimo has ever seen.”
The city of Nanaimo is installing lighting at Serauxmen Stadium starting this month, which will benefit the Nanaimo Minor Baseball Association, the Coal Miners senior program, the Pirates of the BC Premier Baseball League, the Vancouver Island University Mariners team, and of course the new Nanaimo WCL team.
The Nanaimo WCL team unveiled a website — nanaimobaseball.com — that will include easy links to a Name-The-Team Contest, and ways to get in line for best choice of seats for Season Tickets, or for placements with corporate advertising. The team will have an office set up beginning in September.
The Victoria and Nanaimo teams will be separately operated, with independent coaching staffs and independent recruiting processes. The Nanaimo team’s name and coaching staff are expected to be unveiled this coming summer.
