Gopher State Tournament of Champions returns to Brooklyn Park; Delano wins 10AA title
- Wally Langfellow
- Jul 12, 2021
- 3 min read
by Paul Langfellow
July 12, 2021
The Gopher State Tournament of Champions (boys 10U AA division) returned to Brooklyn Park at Northwoods Park and Zane Sports Park July 9th-11th. The tournament featured 26 teams from across the Twin Cities and Minnesota.
This tournament was welcomed by many teams and communities after last year’s hiatus or shorter season due to the pandemic. Kelly Morin, head commissioner of the Brooklyn Park Baseball Association (BPBA) and on-site tournament director last weekend, noted the importance of the Gopher State tournament, “it’s nice to see everybody back at the ballpark and a lot more parents and grandparents coming to the games.” He added that while they actually played during the pandemic last summer, it was a shortened season. “Obviously we had a bunch of other precautions to take into consideration last year as well.”
Gopher State Tournament of Champions 10AA; Northwoods Park
The Gopher State Tournament of Champions is also a way to help and support the association as well as the community. “We have done the Tournament of Champions for several years now, and really enjoy doing it,” explained Morin who stressed the benefits of hosting the tournament. “We do a lot of different tournaments with MYAS,” he continued, “and it just helps support our local organization, it also keeps costs down for us and hopefully gets some improvements here at the ballpark.”
Brian Oxborough of BPBA agreed that The Tournament of Champions is a wonderful fundraiser for their program and will help partially pay to replace the non-functioning scoreboards currently at the fields. An upgrade that will benefit the local teams playing at both Northwoods and Zane Sports Parks.
Teams from around the state and the metro all had various reasons for competing in the Gopher State Tournament last weekend. For Lakeville North head coach Josh Loewen it was a chance to see some good competition, “the kids play well in tournaments and it’s an opportunity to keep on playing.”
Lowen went on to mention how his team had made improvements throughout this year, “we started off pretty slow, but have made big steps towards improving throughout the season,” he explained. “We’re rolling now and have been winning a lot of games, we started off 0 and 8 and now we are a little bit above 500.”
Other teams like Willmar travelled a little further for the tournament, but were just as competitive as they faced off against Osseo-Maple Grove on Saturday morning and against Orono that afternoon. Willmar 10U head coach Tom Deboer did not seem concerned about playing teams they hadn’t faced before, and that the travel didn’t really make a difference in the overall play. “We have played a pretty competitive schedule,” he said, “and it’s fun to come to a tournament like this and play teams you haven’t seen before.”
When asked why he decided to enter his team in this weekend’s tournament, Deboer said, “to our community it’s big, for me it’s really big,” he explained. “I coach the high school baseball team in our town and we have a really good youth program as well… it’s important for me to help build the youth program and help support our high school team as they get older.”
The Delano Tigers beat Grand Rapids by a final score of 14 to 10 in the 10AA championship game on Sunday at Northwoods Park. In the third place game it was the Mahtomedi Zephyrs knocking off Willmar 16 to 8, also played at Northwoods Park on Sunday.
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