A Blind baseball club from Blackburn bought home a hard-fought bronze medal following their first Europewide tournament.
East Lancs Legends Visually Impaired (VI) sports club was only launched in April 2024 and this year took part in the International Blind Baseball tournament in Erd, Hungary.
At the competition they took on teams from Italy, Germany, Hungary as well as Manchester’s Lancashire Lions.
The Italians claimed gold whilst the Lancashire Lion won silver. The East Lancs Legends took the bronze ahead of the German and Hungarian teams.
East Lancs Legends were also presented a sportsmanship award.
The club said: “We entered the competition with no expectations and a vision to treat the experience as a learning curve.
“As we have only been playing for a year, the other four participating clubs are much more experienced than us.
“We are so happy that our hard work and training had paid off, we are extremely grateful to UK Blind baseball for giving us this opportunity and are so overjoyed to end in the bronze medal position.”
Blind baseball is played with a team of five blind/visually impaired players and three sighted volunteers.
All players must wear shades throughout the game to ensure everyone has the same level of vision, as blindness is a spectrum as people can still have residual vision.
The players listen to audio queues which indicate the bases.
The ball has a bell inside it and in the field the players listen to hear where the ball has been hit, when they locate the ball, they will throw it to a sighted catcher at base 2, in order to get the person batting out.
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