Bend Elks

Bend Elks
Wildfire sunset during an Elks home game, Bend at bat
League	West Coast League (South)
Location	Bend, Oregon
Ballpark	Vince Genna Stadium
Logo design
2014 season	31-23
Ownership	John and Tami Marick
Manager	Trey Watt

The Bend Elks are an amateur baseball team from Bend, Oregon.

The team is a founding member of the wooden-bat West Coast League, a collegiate summer baseball league in Oregon, Washington and British Columbia that began play in 2005. The Elks play their home games at Vince Genna Stadium.^[1] The team began play in 2000,^[2] and holds most of the league attendance records.^[3] In 2010 the Elks made the final round of the WCL playoffs for the first time, and set the highest in-league attendance in history.^[4] In 2011 the Elks again set the attendance record, besting their earlier record partway through the season.^[5]

The Elks' most notable alumnus is current New York Yankees outfielder Jacoby Ellsbury, who played for the team in the summer of 2002. The two other MLB Elks-alumni are Brian Barden and Eric Sogard.^[6]

History

The Elks are the latest in a long history of semi-pro and minor-league teams to call Central Oregon home. From the late Seveties until the mid Nineties, Vince Genna Stadium hosted affiliates of the Angels (including a young Kurt Russell), the A's, the Phillies, and the Rockies, generally as part of the Northwest League. However, by 1998 the stadium lacked a main tenant team.^[7]

2000s

Jim and MaryAnn Richards founded the Bend Elks Baseball Club in 2000, with the goal of saving the stadium from demolition following the Bandits' departure, while working with a grassroots campaign called "Save-Our-Stadium." For their first four years the Elks played in the Pacific International League, before joining the WCCBL (now just the WCL) in 2005.^[8]

2010s

The Bend Elks went 31-23 in the 2014 WCL season finishing 4 games behind the leading Corvallis Knights and were awarded the first ever WCL wild card spot. Bend was eliminated after the WCL Divisional Series to the rival Corvallis Knights in 2 games. The Elks were Hit by the pitch 72 times and set a WCL record for the most times hit at the plate in one season. The front office of the Bend Elks put 42,030 people through the turnstiles in 31 games at home with 1,356 per game.

New ownership

In October 2014, John and Tami Marick purchased the Bend Elks Baseball Club from Jim and MaryAnn Richards. The Maricks are founders of Consumer Cellular, a nationwide wireless MVNO based in Tigard, Oregon, with one of its three corporate locations in Central Oregon.^[9]

References