Many people in Slave Lake know Tom Bidart as the co-owner of TA’s Asian Grill and Steakhouse. But long before he opened the restaurant with his wife Anita, he was a dedicated baseball player.

On Aug. 15, the 75-year-old will be honoured for his past in sports when he is inducted into the Saskatchewan Baseball Hall of Fame.

Bidart is entering the hall as a member of the 1971 North Battleford Junior Beavers. All 18 players and the coaches are being inducted to recognize their hard work hosting and playing in the 1971 Canadian Junior Baseball Championship.

Bidart got the official news over the phone earlier this year.

“It was incredibly exciting to get the call, especially since it is such a well-known honour,” Bidart says.

The award ceremony will take place in North Battleford, Saskatchewan, where the museum and its records are located. For Bidart, the trip is a rare and exciting chance to see friends he hasn’t seen in over 50 years.

“I haven’t seen many of these guys since our playing days,” Bidart says. “We all went our separate ways, and most of the players on that team ended up getting college scholarships.”

During the 1971 national championship, the Beavers were built as a junior all-star team to represent Saskatchewan on the big stage. Led by longtime coach Bob Colliar, who had coached in the community since the late 1950s, the team started with a main group of local players from the North Battleford area. To compete with the best in the country, the team added top players from across the province.

Bidart notes that the region was chosen to host the national championship because it had a long history with the sport. He says the local senior ball leagues often brought in players from other places, including many talented Black players from the United States. This helped raise the level of baseball on the prairies.

The team went far in the tournament, making it to the semifinals before losing 9-0 to Quebec. Quebec won gold that year and BC/C-B won silver.

Looking back at old team pictures, Bidart can still point out the bat boys sitting in the front row. One of those boys was Kelvin Colliar, the son of the team’s coach. He grew up to become the co-commissioner of the North Saskatchewan River Baseball League.

Bidart points out that in the 1970s, many young athletes split their time between summer baseball and winter hockey. Because the Beavers pulled such highly skilled talent, several players went on to have great professional careers on the ice rather than the baseball diamond.

The 1971 team included future NHL (National Hockey League) players like Bob Bourne, who won four consecutive Stanley Cups with the New York Islanders, and Bernie Lukowich, who was drafted by the Pittsburgh Penguins in 1972. The team also featured Wayne Ray, who later became the mayor of North Battleford from 1988 to 1996.

Bidart himself stuck with baseball. After finishing his junior career, he took a scholarship to play university baseball at Texas A&M University. His passion for the game eventually led to a unique and rewarding career in the sport.

“I build baseball diamonds for a living,” Bidart says. “We have probably built over 100 of them across Western Canada.”

His work includes well-known fields like Henry Singer Park in Edmonton. In fact, this line of work is what originally brought him to the local community.

“I originally came to Slave Lake to rebuild a few baseball diamonds for the youth provincials,” he says. He is currently working on building a new field and grandstands in Grande Cache, a hamlet situated about 500 km southwest of Slave Lake.

As far as he knows, Bidart is the only member of the 1971 team living in Slave Lake today. Despite his long history in the sport, he is quick to praise the strength of his current hometown’s local youth baseball programs.

“Slave Lake has always been a good baseball town,” Bidart says.

He credits the local minor baseball association and its dedicated volunteers for keeping the sport alive for local kids. He specifically points to community builders like Kevin Campbell for his hard work, and Harry Bartlett, who Bidart feels deserves a spot in the Alberta Baseball Hall of Fame for his years of building local baseball fields and programs.
When the award ceremony takes place this August, the 1971 Beavers will officially take their rightful place in provincial sports history.

Armaan Khanna 

Local Journalism Initiative Reporter