Rotary Field: Home of the WBSC Men's Softball World Cup Group B and Finals
One of the remarkable things with the WBSC Men's Softball World Cup 2024/2025 is the use of existing venues to host the event. The four stadiums of the World Cup were used in the past to stage youth softball world cups in the last decade, including Rotary Field at Prime Ministers' Park in Prince Albert, Canada, which hosted the WBSC U-18 Men's Softball World Cup 2018.
A year before the 2018 tournament, the city of Prince Albert successfully raised $1.5 million CAD to upgrade the Prime Ministers Park facility to build Rotary Field and expand a second diamond, providing the complex with four regulation size fields. Six years later, the central stadium will stage the Men's Softball World Cup Group B in 2024, and the Finals in 2025.
The stadium is located at Prime Ministers Park, the City of Prince Albert's premier outdoor athletic facility. It features four softball diamonds, a regulation natural turf football and soccer field, an athletics track and a baseball field.
Rotary Field stadium seats 600 people in its permanent stands, but the capacity of the stadium increased to more than 5,000 seats during the youth World Cup in 2018. "We knew if we built these diamonds, the world would come," said Felix Casavant, Co-Chairman of the Local Organising Committee, during the youth world cup in 2018. "It was just a great feeling to see the park packed and everybody so enthusiastic and so many positive comments coming from the teams and the fans about our facilities."
The U-18 Men's Softball World Cup in 2018 left a profit of CAD$150,000. The LOC expects another home run with the Group Stage and Finals in Prince Albert. “We estimate the Men's Softball World Cup will bring $3.66 million to the city of Prince Albert during those five days,” Casavant said. “It’s just unbelievable what an event like that does for a small community like ours.”
After the conclusion of the WBSC U-18 Men's Softball World Cup 2018, the event received the Tourism Saskatchewan Marquee Event of the Year award, recognizing the economic and tourism impact in the community, and the sporting legacy in Prince Albert.
“I’ll go back to 1983, when we had the Optimist Field which was just a clay diamond," remembered Casavant. "We now have four diamonds at Prime Ministers Park, three diamonds with lights and all four diamonds with scoreboards. These diamonds are second to none in the world.”
Photo: City of Prince Albert