The Tribune

By BRENT STUBBS

Senior Sports Reporter

bstubbs@tribunemedia.net

ORGANISER Michael Butler said he was quite impressed with the outcome of the 10th annual Ed Armbrister Baseball Summer Camp, which paid tribute to the late Major League Baseball Player.

The camp closed out on Saturday at the Flamingo Gardens Park in Carmichael where the awards presentation took place. On hand to participate in the event was Armbrister’s wife, Rose.

“It’s very important for us to keep Ed’s memory alive,” Butler said. “We had a fairly good turnout, you could consider it moderate because our concentration was more on preparing some of our performance players.

“We have some of them on the verge of getting placed in high school programmes and some of them are being looked at as professional prospects, so we want to sharpen them a little more. We wanted to give them more personal training as to the large group setting.”

One of them was Caden Walker, the top prospect in the Ed Armbrister programme. On hand to view him in action were Phil Davis, a high school/college recruiter and Brian Armbrister, a Bahamian pro baseball scout.

Butler revealed that Walker, through the assistance of Davis, will be heading to Tallulah Falls School, a private boarding and day school in Tallulah Falls in Georgia in August.

“I know he’s very excited about this opportunity that has been afforded to him,” said Butler of the highly recruited student/athlete.

“We’ve had a number of recruiters who were interested in him, but he decided to go to Tallulah Falls.

“We engaged Phil Davis who came over and watched him. We had some discussions with Caden’s parents and we sent the school some footage of him and they liked what they saw.”

After being interviewed by the school’s administration, the 15-year-old Walker, who attended Anatol Rodgers High School, was accepted and now Butler said he’s heading off to Georgia.

“We’re elated about this because Caden has been in our programme for nine years,” Butler said.

“You never know what will become of these young boys and girls when they first come into the [programme).

“It’s hard to determine what will become of them. But they come in and you’re excited because they’re willing to learn. Caden was one of them in our camp, but what we liked about him was that he was fully committed to the programme and it’s now paying dividends.”

Butler said it was also a very special moment for the programme to have Rose Armbrister come out and express her gratitude to the campers and the organisers for continuing the work her husband started 10 years ago.

The camp will now take a break until September when they will be heading into an academy mode for aspiring players who are assisting to get into better high school programmes in the United States.

“We’re open to talk to parents who want their children to come into a development programme,” Butler said. “We will provide the extra preparations for the opportunities that are now available through the Ed Armbrister programme.”

Butler, however, said they’re hoping that over the summer, they will be able to see some much needed repairs to the infrastructure at the facilities to help in the development of the youngsters in the programme.

“Many years after the passing of Hurricane Matthew, we lost all of our fencing and for all of those years, we have been promised that these fences will be put back in place, but it hasn’t happened,” Butler said.

“We’ve had to deal with the challenges of not having the field closed. You have pedestrian traffic and vehicular traffic and we put the campers and ourselves at risk. This is why this is extremely important for us at this time. We need that to happen immediately so that we can keep our kids safe and the community safe at the same time.”

Butler said they’re calling on the authorities to make good to their promise made when Armbrister was alive to repair the fences.

Hopefully, Butler said they can have those promises fulfilled.