Roseau Times-Region - Serving Roseau County for over 100 Years - The Official Roseau County Newspaper

What a great weekend for Roseau's 12-year-olds, who showed plenty of spunk by placing 3rd at State in Waite Park to advance to this weekend's Cal Ripken Region Baseball Tournament in Fargo on July 22-24.

"We played 6 games and won 4 of them," said Todd Wensloff, adding that it was a 11-team tournament and only 3 teams advanced to the region tourney.

Roseau punched their ticket, but not without needing some remarkable rallies.

"We had really good pitching, our defense was spectacular, and we had some timely hitting," he said. "We didn't hit great, but we had some good clutch hitting."

That was the consensus of the coaching staff of Wensloff, Scott Severson, and Matt Heddan.

In the opening game on Friday, the Ripken Kids defeated Waite Park, 3-1, in extra innings. Also, on Friday, they defeated Thief River Falls, 3-1.

"It put us in a pretty good spot winning those first 2 games," said Wensloff.

On Saturday morning, Moorhead jumped out to an early 6-0 lead, but the kids battled back to make a game of it, losing 6-2.

In the double elimination format, if they lost again, they were out.

"We had to win 2 games more to get into the 3rd place round," said Wensloff.

Talk about being in a deep hole, they quickly fell behind 5-2 to Fergus Falls.

"We had a nice rally late in the game and that kept us going," he said.

That's an understatement. The Ripken Kids rallied to win 7-5 and advance to Sunday's round.

Their next opponent was Warroad, which quickly jumped ahead, 6-0. But the kids put a couple of runs on the scoreboard and only trailed 6-2 after 4 innings.

"In the top of the 5th, we loaded the bases and we got a triple," he said, finally mentioning that Aaron Wensloff had hit the bases-loaded triple.

Then the next batter hit a sacrifice fly to score Wensloff, and the score was tied at 6-6.

But not for long.

Max Strand hit a solo homerun over the fence, and the Roseau kids had punched their ticket to the Regions in Fargo.

Only 3 teams were still standing - Bemidji, Moorhead and Roseau, with the latter two playing for the honor of playing in the finals.

"Let's not mention the score," said Mr. Wensloff, adding that Moorhead won in a rout.

But Roseau automatically qualified to Fargo where only one team will advance to the Cal Ripken World Series.

"We'll be an underdog, but I'm pretty proud of these guys for getting as far as we have," he said, noting that they are guaranteed 3 games at Fargo.