TALENTED baseball pitcher Jackson Boyd, of Langwarrin will again represent Australia as he heads for the under-18s Baseball World Cup in Thunder Bay, Canada.
Boyd, 17, flew out last Saturday 19 August and will have eight lead-up matches before the opening round of the World Cup on Friday 1 September.
Boyd made the selection for the 20-player team, following an impressive performance at an Australian academy camp on the Gold Coast earlier this year.
This will be the first time that Boyd has made the Australian World Cup side and he said making the team is a whole other level.
“I’m going to be playing with the best of the best and they could even be future Major League Baseball stars,” he said.
Boyd, who was part of the Southern Mariners, a representative charter for the Victorian bayside suburbs, is no stranger to performing at the top-level.
Last year the Southern Mariners managed to reach the senior level championship game at the Little League World Series in Bangor, Maine, United States and in doing so became the first Australian side to make the finals of a World Series tournament.
The Southern Mariners journey started in Geelong where they won the state championships in January last year before taking out the national championships in NSW later in May. They then went on to triumph at the Asia-Pacific Championships in The Philippines which secured them a spot in the World Series.
Boyd said making it to the World Series was an achievement in itself but to do as well as they did wasn’t really expected.
“We won our way all the way up to the World Series where we managed to finish runners-up,” he said. “We didn’t even think we would win a game over there so coming second was a massive shock.”
Boyd and the under-18s Australian side is now set to face world number three, Korea, on the opening day of the 2017 Baseball World Cup.
