Elliott: Calder Eagleton wins CBN's Dawgs scholarship

1B Calder Eagleton (Calgary, Alta.), now of the Bismark State Mystics, won the Canadian Baseball Network annual Okotoks Dawgs scholarship.

By Bob Elliott

Canadian Baseball Network

Calder Eagleton was supposed to be on stage at the Foothills Centennial Centre in Okotoks, Alta. on Feb. 2, 2019.

He had tried out for the Okotoks Dawgs a number of years and now was finally going to make the team that spring.

The game is about perseverance. How this most difficult and individualistic team sport is for survivors. Eagleton had persevered. He had survived. The end of the guest speaker’s talk was supposed to be about how you can never give up.

Then, Eagleton was going to be called to the stage to sit in the chair that the speaker had brought with him. The plan was that the crowd could cheer as the speaker quietly made an exit ... stage left.

Except Eagleton never made it.

Neither did the speaker (guilty).

I sat in his chair -- or collapsed as MC William Gardner told me the next day -- about three minutes in ... end of speech. Dawgs coach Lou Pote was off running to the front of the building for a defibrillator machine. Dawgs founding father John Ircandia had insisted all his staff take a course on how to work the machine after an Okotoks curler was saved earlier that year.

Dawgs photographer Angela Burger and trainer Savannah Blakley began CPR. They zapped me once. I came back to life. I crashed again. By then, Okotoks fireman Geoff Scott zapped me again and I awoke in a High River ambulance with coach Allen Cox riding shot gun and some new friends

Burger, Blakely, Pote and Scott saved my life that night. I spend 16 days in Foothills hospital in Calgary and left with two stints and my own defibrillator machine. They told me I either had a ventricular tachycardia or a ventricular fibrillation.

After the two procedures the day I was released I had tons of emails and texts. The best was from 2020 Tip O’Niell winner, Jamie Romak, who wrote something like “I have contacted tons of guys after they were released ... this is the first time I’ve ever said ‘congrats on your release.’”

Dr. Donald Campbell (Ottawa, Ont.), who holds an honorary doctorate from Carleton University, I think, arrived for a last-minute consult wearing a Nick Riveria white lab coat.

One Foothills doc joked “take your $40,000 worth of Alberta equipment and go back to Ontario.”

But back to 1B Eagleton ... he is the winner of the Canadian Baseball Network annual Dawgs scholarship. INF Ricardo Sanchez (Okotoks, Alta.), OF Danny Donnelly (Okotoks, Alta.) and OF Tucker Zdunich (High River, Alta.) are former Canadian Baseball Network scholarship winners.

“I tried out for the Dawgs 12U team but I could not afford it,” he said. “I made the team my second year of midget and played for the 16U team. Then, I played for the 18U Red team for two years.”

And so each year he didn’t make the team would return to the Calgary Cubs and keep working. Not that the Cubs were chopped liver, but they were not the Dawgs.

I phoned him recently to tell him he had been picked as our Dawgs scholarship winner. I asked if he remembered that night and knew the chair had been meant for him.

“Yes ... you told me about it, before the banquet started,” said Eagleton (Calgary, Alta.).

Oh. Forgot about that.

We didn’t forget to mail the scholarship check. Now, whether I put the proper year on in the little boxes ... that’s another matter. We’ll soon know.

Eagleton was speaking from Bismark, North Dakota, where he is playing for the Bismark State Mystics as a freshman, where he wears No. 99. Why? Because they gave it to him.

Jeff Duda, Dawgs Academy head coach and Canadian Baseball Network’s top Canuck pitcher in independent ball and foreign lands in 2012 when he was the ace of the Quebec Capitales, had kind words for Calder.

“Calder had a blue collar mentality on and off the field,” said Duda. “During his senior year in the program, he worked as a welder to help pay for college all while attending school and training in the Dawgs program. He was a fixture in the middle of the line-up in his sophomore and junior seasons on 16U and 18U Red, respectively.”

Last spring he split time at first base with fellow Bismarck State teammate, Nash Crowell.

In 2020, Bismark State won its conference but lost in the regional to Miles Community College Pioneers. From the sounds of Eagleton’s scouting report the Mystics are expected to play deep into the spring. In 10 fall ball games they outscored the opposition 107-9.

This summer he played for the Okotoks Red in the Western Canadian League hitting .171 in 15 games against older competition with one RBI.

“Calder is a hard working blue collar type kid,” said Cox from Myrtle Beach. “I know this because after making the team a couple times he wasn’t able to afford the program. Calder took matters into his own hands and went out and made enough money to pay his own way to the Dawgs program.

“He could always square up some balls and was a game type clutch hitter who always came through late in the game with a big hit. A definite favorite with his peers as well. I loved coaching Calder.”

Eagleton had praise for Dawgs coaches especially Tyler Hollick, Val Helldobler, who helped teach defence, Cox, who taught him hitting and Bretton Gouthro.

“I could talk to (Gouthro) about anything,” said Eagleton, whose mother, Leslie operates a mill store, while father Dave is a Bell project manager.