When Duane Krip first joined the board of directors for the Prince Albert Minor Baseball Association (PAMBA), he never thought he would get recognized for a provincial award for his work.
Krip was honored at the Baseball Sask Annual Awards in Saskatoon with the 2023 Builder of the Year Award for his many years he put in as a board member with PAMBA.
Krip says he was humbled to receive the award.
“It came as a huge surprise, considering that this is a province wide award and I’m sure there are other individuals out there who have worked in building baseball, but it does mean a lot to me. The recognition on a grander scale is really nice. You never go into a position like what I was doing, thinking that there would ever be any recognition. You do it because there’s a job that needs to be done. Recognition, it’s nice to have, but definitely came as a shock to me.”
Krip first became involved with the executive branch of PAMBA when he was voted to the board as a member at large in 2017. He recalled the situation of PAMBA when he first joined as far from ideal.
“When I first came on the board, the organization was struggling financially. Essentially at that time, we had no money. We didn’t have money in that first year when I was on the board to even pay for the diamond rentals. There was a lot of work that needed to be done. I remember there wasn’t enough money to even provide the equipment for catchers or adequate umpire gear. It was in quite a dire situation.”
Krip first became president of PAMBA in the fall of 2018 and helped the organization recover financially and secured funding for the Grand Slam Rebuild Project at the Kinsmen Baseball Complex.
Krip says he gives a lot of credit to the rest of the board for helping PAMBA get to where it is today.
“A lot of work had to be done and I certainly didn’t do it myself. We assembled a really great board. Everyone rolled up their sleeves and made things happen. The biggest thing that we were able to do is get the organization financially right so that we would be able to afford to do the things that we needed to do infrastructure wise. We made a lot of accomplishments over the last five years.”
After taking a new job opportunity, Krip and his family relocated to Saskatoon earlier this year and he no longer serves as president of PAMBA, with Nathan Noble being elected as the president of the organization at the AGM earlier this fall.
Looking back on his time with PAMBA, Krip says he was pleased to see how many people stepped up to help with whatever task was needed.
“I’ve been really fortunate in that time is to have an incredible group of community-minded volunteers who are able to step up and help out and make things happen. All I can do is kind of provide the vision and say here’s where we want to take the organization, but we need a lot of doers. We had a lot of doers, a lot of great people that stepped into roles of division coordinators and into coaching roles. It’s those kinds of people that really made the organization successful in the grand scheme of things. You need to have grassroots people who are willing to do the work.”
sports@paherald.sk.ca
