June 25, 2024
FORT COLLINS, Colo. – Canada is widely appreciated for its wide-open spaces, but when it comes to sports, citizens keep that all very close to the heart.
More evidence is brewing in the summer of 2024 as the Canadian national softball team journeys to Colorado and the debut of the Triple Crown Sports P5 fastpitch event from June 26-29 on the TCS campus. Highlighting the slate are games between Team Canada and Team Colorado, set for 6 p.m. June 26 and 28, with both those programs set to compete in early July at the Canada Cup.
Kaleigh Rafter played 14 seasons on the Canadian national team before taking the reins as head coach three years ago. Her primary coaching gig is as an assistant with the powerful Florida State program, but the task of building her home-country squad taps into a vein of enthusiasm that shows no sign of waning.
“The competition piece is something we all love. I stuck around for 14 years before taking over the team; it’s our goal to be one of the best teams in the world,” said Rafter, who is a two-time Olympian and four-time medalist at the Pan Am Games. “We are all spread apart, so any chance we get to come together and be centralized, the excitement is high. We’re excited for our summer – first time in Colorado as an international program, then headed to our usual stop at the Canada Cup and then the World Championships. A busy summer, going to happen fast, but we’re really excited.”
The Canada roster reflects the span of territory and the wide range of ages you typically find in this “all-star” type of arrangement. Katie Korstrom plays collegiately at Azusa Pacific in California, while Janet Leung went to school at Brown in Rhode Island; provinces from British Columbia to Ontario are represented in 2024.
“When you’re playing in college, or in travel ball, you’re playing with people about two or three years of yourself. On this team, we have a player who turned 32, and the youngest just turned 18,” Rafter said. “It’s a great mix and keeps it interesting – the older ones take the younger ones under their wing, and the energy and youthfulness of the younger players who are on the team for the first time, it refreshes the older ones and gets them excited for another run.
“One of my gifts is I can remember a lot; I’m who people go to when they try to recall something. We played a game against Australia in 2018 at Worlds, in a position to play for a gold or a bronze, and we were able to win that game. That was a big one for us. 2015, Pan Am Games in Toronto, some big games, beat the USA that year to win gold on the home soil. Qualifying in 2019, we beat Brazil to reach the Olympics in 2020, another huge game on home soil. And there were some heartbreakers as well.”
Ahead of handing out jerseys for the players who made the team this year, Rafter had them recall a specific tournament and tell their favorite non-softball memory from the experience. It proved to be a powerful mechanism to remind everyone of what they’ve been exposed to through the sport, and how valuable and resonating their relationships have become.
“Every team at this level is going to be like that; you gather up good players from all over the country. The cool part about playing for a national team is the moment you put on a jersey, you’re paying for something bigger. That’s easy to say for college, but when you sign up for your country, it is a unifying thread that maintains itself constantly through the team.
“We pride ourselves on that, what it means to be Canadian and how we play. It's a gift that we get to represent our nation and that makes the training easier. It’s a ‘get-to’ thing … I’m not here because my parents made me, or because I got a scholarship, but truly because I want to play at the highest level and represent my country.”
DATARELATED –Another aspect of the 2024 P5 event is the field of about 40 fastpitch club programs who will come to TCS and play five games while also getting a dedicated window to go through the paces of the new CSE Performance Lab. The Lab is fully decked out to uncover the important numbers in hitting and pitching, flexing the nation’s most impressive rig of high-speed cameras, tell-tale force plates, 3D imaging and more.
Rafter and the staff at Florida State are already big consumers of analytic insights, and she remains intrigued by other insights set to be uncovered by time in the CSE Lab.
“Big picture, you always thought you knew what you knew, and many coaches have a good feel for the game,” Rafter added. “For many coaches, data hasn’t changed anything they thought or what they could have told you anyway, but it’s a way to quantify it, measure it, and say this is how good somebody is at something and by how much.
“Great pitchers are just going to be great – they’re something of a unicorn. But data helps you see value in a lot of different types. Why is this pitcher doing well, under the radar at a smaller school? Well, they can do something we see in the numbers, and when you see another player with that characteristic, you now knowhow that might play out and you don’t overlook a player.”
Teams playing at the P5 will also see important data pulled from in-game action, andnot just the CSE Lab setting, as state-of-the-art Trackman devices monitor pitchvelocity and spin, and for batting, ball trajectory and exit velocity.
