Jays Care Foundation awards Regina little league $40,000

Thanks to the Toronto Blue Jays, a Regina little league is going to be able to help make baseball accessible to everyone.

The North Regina Little League was named one of the recipients of $40,000 from the Jays Care Foundation Field of Dreams program.

NRLL president Chris Kayter said the money is going to go towards making the field at Kinsmen Park North more accessible for kids with the Challenger program. The program pairs up kids with disabilities with buddies to play baseball.

“Usually it’s our older age group kids just due to strength and ability to help them around (and) teach them some baseball stuff. There’s a lot of volunteers within the Challenger program that come out and help. It’s nice to have some of our older kids come out and the smile on their face playing with these guys is delightful,” Kayter told Saskatchewan Afternoon on Monday.

“I just marvel at these kids and how far they come in one season just being able to be out there with their friends and run and play a game that everyone loves.”

Unfortunately the field the kids were playing on wasn’t up to par.

Kayter said the field had very little parking access and kids would have to go down a path to get to the field. Kayter says kids who need to use wheelchairs had to go through grass and some trees to get to it.

“We wanted to give them a more accessible and a better-quality field to play on,” Kayter said. “The diamond that they were playing on before, it wasn’t the best quality of diamond. We always do our best as volunteers but this just takes it a notch up for them.”

Due to COVID-19 and a number of kids with the Challenger program being immunocompromised, the program isn’t taking place in 2020 so the money will go towards helping the 2021 programming.