Successful & Informative Seminar

February 15 saw the BC Premier Baseball League and Baseball BC hosted a successful and informative seminar on performance enhancing drugs  to a packed room of players, coaches, parents, and representatives from BC Minor

All lower mainland teams from the BCPBL were represented and teams from the island and Kelowna will have access to the taped session to hold parent/player meetings in their respective communities.

The taped session can be accessed from a You Tube link on the BCPBL website; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BGng2R0FTw.

A DVD is also available for meetings upon request through the Premier Baseball Association.

Ted Hotzak, president of the BCPBL, outlined why the association is taking the initiative to launch the performance enhancing drugs program in 2014; with the support and participation from Baseball B.C.

The BCPBL will be utilizing, Citahealth, a local company with expertise in the field of drug and alcohol testing with offices in Vancouver and Langley.

Since 1993, nationally certified technicians from Citahealth have conducted more than 25,000 confidential and legally defensible collections in British Columbia; more than any other organization in BC.

Frank Soper, from Citahealth, shared a power point presentation with the audience to provide information about performance enhancing drugs and the collection process to be used for the BCPBL.

Also, he noted how Citahealth will work with the BCPBL to carry out the random collection of specimens for drug testing in 2014.

These collection samples will be shipped for testing to the only World Anti Doping Agency (WADA) approved laboratory in Canada, INRS – Institute Armand-Frappier in Laval Quebec.

This agency is tasked with developing and maintaining a list of banned substances for sport in the world.

WADA has an excellent website www.wada-ama.org/ with a significant amount of information on doping.