At the league championship tournament last weekend, the Moose Jaw Canucks lost their first game of the round robin, but then went on to claim first place in their pool.

They’re going to need a repeat performance of that effort after falling 5-1 to the Weyburn Beavers in the Baseball Sask Midget AA Provincial Championship opener on Friday afternoon at Ross Wells Park.

After working on their hitting in the lead up to the opening game this week, the Canucks couldn’t get their offence going in the loss to Weyburn.

“They’re disappointed, they should be disappointed, it was a big game, but tomorrow’s another day,” said head coach Kevin Smith.  “We have to come out and play a good game in the morning (Saturday), get on a little bit of a roll and make that game (Saturday) night mean something.”

An RBI-triple by Dawson Kurz in the second inning was all the offence that Moose Jaw could muster in the game.

They did strand at least one runner on base in each inning.

“We just couldn’t get anything rolling,” said Smith.  “Hopefully our bats get going a bit better (Saturday) and we get things going for the five o’clock game.”

The Beavers opened the scoring in the first and then put the game away with four runs in sixth.  They loaded up the bases before Evan McClarty walked in a run and Travis Corbin smoked a two-run single.

Two errors in the sixth cost Moose Jaw.  They had five in the loss.

“Overall our plan for the pitching was okay, we went one guy further than we wanted to; defensively, we did make an error or two and that’s unfortunate; but again, we only got the one run and we’ve got to have more runs and that boils down to our bats,” said Smith.

Moose Jaw will be back on the field at 11:30am against the Regina White Sox at Ross Wells Park.  They finish the round robin at 4:30pm against the Humboldt Dodgers at Blackwell Diamond.

In other day one action, the North East Red Sox topped the North Battleford Beavers, 12-2; the North West Pirates knocked off the Regina Pacers, 8-4; and the White Sox took out the Dodgers, 9-6.