President's Report 2023
This year brought another successful year on and off the field for Sydney Uni Baseball Club, which started off with long term members of the club executive moving as they entered different stages of career and family life. I’d like to thank Wade Shipard, Matt Kelleher, and Hartley Anderson for fulfilling their respective roles of President, Secretary and Patron over many years, and their continued support of the club this season.
Our 2023 season hit its first hurdle when our 4th team, playing in the Pacific Coast Baseball League, had a late surge in the season but ultimately missed out on a finals spot from other results not going in their favour in the last round of competition. A strong core of players over the last several years, led by Anthony Carroll, combined with enthusiastic new players show promise for an expansion in 2024. With growing the club in mind, SUBC also put together a social softball team in semester 2 to facilitate new student participation and encourage development of skills to then build the club come 2024.
Playing in the Sydney Winter Baseball League, our 3rd grade team continued the post-COVID rebuild by making it to the grand final, but ultimately falling short to Petersham. The highlight of the year for the team was club multi-decade veteran, Scott Moran, stating at the start of the year that the season would be his swansong. Taking the mound most games, he produced league leading results on his way to the league’s 2023 Pitching Award.
Our 2nd grade team went one better than 3rd grade, being the team to beat during the season en route to taking home the Ken Gulliver Trophy, defeating Quaker's Hill 9-6. The team came out of the gates hot with the bats in the grand final, and defensively held nerves late in the game. A significant factor to that was Lachlan Dean, who took home the grand final MVP for his dual performance on the mound and batter’s box. The dominance of the team through the season showed in league awards, with Lachlan Dean winning the season MVP and Zac Horton winning the season pitching award. The awards sweep was narrowly missed, with Cooper Horton putting in a season for the ages with the stick, but unfortunately losing out in the hitting award.
The 1st grade team had glimpses of excellence from the young squad; however, it will be reflected on as a season of missing key pieces of the puzzle, with representative duties and injuries taking their tolls. With winter baseball having such a busy calendar in Australia, I’d like to pay gratitude to Head Coach, Mitch Liddle. He has excelled in his ability to juggle roster challenges throughout the season, including several of our players on national team duties and reporting to colleges in the US. It was the club’s pleasure to witness his awarding of a much-deserved university Gold in November from the Sydney Uni Alumni Association for his services as a coach and leader of SUBC.
The club continued the culture of keeping ties to past players and recognising the efforts from the Cynics supporters to get a team on the field each week. We continued our recent tradition of holding our Past vs Present game as a warm-up to the season, and then Alumni round to close out our home games for the year. We also continued to raise money and awareness to causes close to the playing group, using our Community Day to raise just over $1000 for the Phelan McDermid Syndrome Foundation.
Here’s to 2023- celebrating our achievements, persevering through challenges, and looking forward to 2024.
Ben Warnock
President
Sydney University Baseball Club