Coquitlam Reds baseball player helps wins gold at women’s nationals
Sarah Pengelly said it was a “big team effort”
Sarah Pengelly hit a home run on Sunday at the 21U women’s national championships in Prince Edward Island, helping the team take gold and making her home team proud.
“That’s our girl,” Coquitlam Reds, a team in the B.C. Premier Baseball League, posted on X (formerly Twitter).
“It was so cool,” Pengelly said in a phone interview with the Dispatch. “I didn’t even know it was a home run.”
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“Like, off the bat, everybody said that they knew it was, but the fences were at like 300 feet. So I thought it was just a line drive, and I was like hustling it as a second.”
Pengelly answers the phone from Quebec City, where she and the rest of the B.C. Aces women’s baseball team flew to Wednesday for the next week of the women’s nationals tournament. She’s just gotten off practice and is still buzzing after the win.
“We had a team goal before going into the whole tournament, and it was to win gold,” she said. “It was just a big team hitting fest.”
After they won, the team celebrated by jumping around the field, taking photos and having a dance circle. “It’s a blur. We were all just super excited and happy.”
The team had only been practising for a week before the tournament, but they have played together for years on team B.C. “Everybody’s just like a big family,” she said.
Playing for the Coquitlam Reds
Back in B.C., Pengelly is the only female player for the Coquitlam Reds.
She’s played baseball since she was four years old, and, while there are female softball leagues, there aren’t many options for women’s baseball — there’s only B.C. Badgers.
But Pengelly wanted to keep playing baseball, so she tried out for the Coquitlam Reds in Grade 10.
To her surprise, she made the team as a closing pitcher. The next year, she became a starting pitcher.
Her goals are to play with the Women’s National Team again — she made it through tryouts last year but not this year — and to play baseball for as long as she can.
While she hopes women’s baseball continues to grow, Pengelly enjoys her time playing with the Reds.
“All the guys are like my brothers,” she said. “They always respect me. They know that I’m one of our good pitchers. So they know that when I go out on the mound that I’ll get the job done.”
