by PAUL RAYNER

In 2006, it was about bringing senior baseball back to Boissevain. With three seasons under their belt, the Centennials are happy to call themselves SouthWest Baseball League Champions.

They won the crown on Sunday, August 31 by downing the Wawanesa Brewers 7-2 in an odd post-season that included two week waits between series, a tied game and a points system to get to the championship. Coach Jason Billaney’s initial reaction was not about victory.

“It was more of a relief than satisfying at first,” Billaney said. “I did not really think about that end of it until later. We wanted so badly to say we won it, it was a relief when we did.”

On Sunday, Ryan Albrecht led the way offensively, with a home run, a single and two runs batted in. Junior Brake doubled and scored once, and pitched the final inning for the Cents. However, Billaney said young starter Adam Pugh was the star, with eight innings pitched seven strikeouts and only six hits allowed.

“Adam was terrific. You have a 19-year old and you give him the ball for the final and he was great. He worked the strike zone, didn’t walk anybody. I told him I wanted five good innings and he just did the job.”

Wawanesa starter and loser Curtis Plett scored both runs for the visitors. Billaney said he was the starter for Game 3 in Wawanesa when the Centennials came back and tied, so there was confidence.

“Everyone was hitting him well that game,” Billaney said. “So everyone in the lineup knew they could get a hit. That might have been a kick start for us.”

There might have actually been several kick-starts for the Centennials this year. First, they made it all the way to the finals last year, to lose to these same Brewers. Billaney said it created some expectations on the squad, which they were initially unable to meet.

“We were talking about first place, hoping to play .750 ball. We didn’t do that, so we had the feeling ‘we need to win the league’.”

The club finished a game above .500 and in third place. This meant an opening series with the Deloraine Royals, while the two top teams, Wawanesa and the Souris Cardinals, had a pre-playoff rest. Billaney feels in the end it may have helped his players.

“When we played Deloraine, it might have been a confidence builder, a chance to get our bats going. It may have given us an advantage, getting a week before Souris and Wawanesa played.”

It showed in the semi-finals, when the Cents took out the Cards, who along with the Brewers gave them fits in the regular season. One turning point might have been coming back from a six run deficit in Game 3, including five runs in the ninth inning to win in Souris. The comebacks continued in the final, including one at home in Game 4, where they won on a sacrifice fly from Josh Dueck in the bottom of the ninth.

Although the club was shut out the next game in Wawanesa, Billaney said he felt the clutch bats, missing much of the season but appearing in the playoffs, would return for the final set. He was right.

It also did not hurt that the club lost only one game, to Souris, in the playoffs. Part of that home record, the coach said, was due to fan support.

“The fan support was unbelievable,” he stated. “All year it was great. There was total interest, with people calling and stopping me on the street to talk about it. Sunday was packed, and they were rooting for us to win. The fan support certainly helped us win games. They got us all pumped up.”

He said they also attracted the attention of some of the community’s young baseball players, which will be important to the future of the Centennials.

Billaney does not see the championship as simply a 2008 triumph. It is part of an overall odyssey. The club came back together in ’06, with several of the current crew, including AJ Armstrong, Josh Dueck and Dustin Pugh, after a several-year absence. They were young, and as Billaney remembers, a team that was beaten by more than 20 runs in their first game, ironically against Wawanesa. The next year, a few veterans, like Corey Billaney, Ryan Albrecht and Junior Brake were added to the mix, and they made it to the finals. This championship in only three years makes the Centennials one of the most successful “expansion” teams in history.

“Obviously, I congratulated the guys when they won,” Billaney explained. “We played well. But it was special for the guys that were here from the first. They put in a lot of hard work, especially the guys from the first year when we were getting bombed. I let them know I appreciated their hard work for three years. They set a foundation.”

“That was probably the most satisfying part of it. It was a three year deal.”