Winnipeg Goldeyes travel 500 miles to teach baseball to kids from Manitoba

Thompson, Manitoba, is a small city with a population of roughly 13,000 people. It's about as far north as you can go before reaching the true remote reaches of Canada, where you need ice roads, railroads or airplanes to get around. And yet, for Play Ball Weekend last month, members of the Winnipeg Goldeyes of the American Association -- a partner league with Major League Baseball -- made the trip to host baseball camps for about 100 kids in the region.

"It was amazing. It was very cool for us to go out there and be welcomed like we were," Andrew Collier, general manager of the Goldeyes, told MLB.com.

Primarily a mining town, approximately half the population is Indigenous, something that was important to the team when selecting a location.

"I wanted to do something because we have camps in our ballpark throughout the year," Collier said. "I just wanted to do something a little different and go somewhere where kids don't often get this kind of opportunity."

Along with Collier, starting pitcher Tyler Jandron, coach Danny Perron and members of the club's social media team and front office, along with members of Baseball Manitoba, made the trip. During the three-hour clinic, children from the local Boys and Girls Club and a local school ran through drills on hitting, fielding and pitching before walking away with a bat-and-ball set from MLB to continue playing on their own.

"The coordinator from the Boys and Girls club was very appreciative of us coming there to put on the camp," Collier said. "She mentioned a few times that those kids never get to do anything like this."

One consideration the team had to make: Not only did they have a camp to host, they also needed to make it back to Winnipeg -- about a 500 mile trip -- in time for the game that evening. Fortunately, thanks to a partnership with Calm Air, the team was able to both fly up for the day, but make it back, too.

"We took a pitcher [Jandron] that had pitched either the night before or two nights before, so we knew he wasn't going to be pitching in this game. And the coach. We arrived in about the second inning of our game."

While Manitoba may not be the first province when you think about baseball -- former big leaguer Corey Koskie is from Anola -- the baseball passion is strong.

"Southern Manitoba has a huge baseball history," Collier said. "A lot of good teams, a lot of good players come out of southern Manitoba. As you're further north, obviously they have less of a baseball season. Thompson has a great baseball program and they really try to grow the game."

The success of the day -- along with the smiles from the kids -- inspired the team to think about other cities that may not usually get the chance to learn from professional ballplayers.

"We're already looking forward to next year and maybe even doing another northern community," Collier said. "Maybe get up to Churchill, or The Pas or some other other places -- Rankin Inlet, maybe. But it'll all depend on timing when we have home games -- and on the planes. We picked Thompson because it actually had planes that went up there in the morning and came back at night because we had a game. So, we needed to get back."