For Melville’s Nathan Houston, winning a Western Canadian Baseball League championship with the Saskatoon Berries was a pretty special way to cap off his summer.
Houston played a key role for the Berries throughout the 2026 season, hitting .341 with 41 runs, 39 RBIs and 15 stolen bases during the regular season.
He was also coming off two seasons of getting close but not quite getting to the top. Houston had been part of Moose Jaw’s championship run in 2024 and then watched the Berries fall short in the playoffs last season.
This year, Saskatoon put it all together.
The Berries finished 38-and-18 before knocking off Regina, sweeping Moose Jaw and then taking care of Sylvan Lake in the championship series.
Houston says the championship means even more because of the Saskatchewan connection he shared with several teammates.
“It means a lot for us Saskatchewan-grown kids to be able to win it,” Houston said.
The Berries were a young team this season, and Houston says that hunger helped drive the group.
He felt the team wasn’t always playing its cleanest baseball early in the season, but things started to come together down the stretch.
“We tightened it up, and then we started playing better ball towards the end of the year,” Houston said. “It kind of just clicked in the playoffs.”
That playoff run ended with the Berries sweeping the Sylvan Lake Gulls for the first championship in franchise history.
Houston was on the field for the final out and says the feeling was more relief than anything else.
“Just pure relief, I think,” he said. “I really wanted to win for those guys, and I’m just glad we got it done for them.”
The championship also carries some extra meaning for Houston because he grew up watching the Melville Millionaires win the WCBL title in 2013.
He says he never really imagined as a kid that he would eventually win a Saskatchewan championship of his own.
“It’s definitely a cool experience,” Houston said.
Houston also credits the Berries’ fans for helping push the team through the long summer. He says walking onto the field late in the season and seeing a packed Cairns Field could provide an immediate boost.
“You get 2,400 fans to come to the game, and you feel pretty good all of a sudden,” he said.
Now Houston will return to Texas, where he has two more years of college baseball at UTRGV.
For now, he’s simply hoping to keep playing for as long as possible.
“I just play as long as I can, really,” Houston said. “I just continue to play and see what happens.”
After helping bring the first WCBL championship to Saskatoon, Houston will head back south with a pretty good summer to look back on, and another championship to add to his baseball journey.
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