The 1986 Portage Diamonds will be forever remembered in the Manitoba Softball Hall of Fame. The team will be inducted at a ceremony in Portage la Prairie come May. The Diamonds were co-founded by Larry Dewis and Manitoba's premier, Brian Pallister -- who can throw a mean riseball.

"We had a lot of good ball players, and some hadn't competed at this level before," says co-founder Larry Dewis. "We were fortunate though to have Brian Pallister, one of the top pitchers in Manitoba at the time, he wanted to play for his hometown and that's how things got started.”

The '86 Diamonds finished first-place in the Winnipeg Senior Men's Fastball League (WSMFL) and defeated the Winnipeg Internationals to capture the league title. They then went on to the Canadian Nationals in P.E.I. and had seven players named to the WSMFL all-star team.

“We had a lot of good players locally that wanted to step up and compete and devote the time necessary to a demanding schedule,” Dewis explains. “It all came together, there were a lot of injuries along the way but we won the Winnipeg Fastball League, the playoffs, and the provincials too. So a pretty good year for our first season."

Pallister says it was an exciting time when they decided to field a team from Portage.

"(Larry Dewis) and I both played national level ball and wanted to give something back to our community, and we thought this was a great idea to get a team going in Portage. We had a great group of guys, all local except for one, Rick McKay -- a great pitcher from Crane River near Dauphin," says Pallister. "We ended up winning the province and having a great experience together. The fans really supported us too, so it was a special highlight to play in front of friends and family after playing in New Zealand and all over the world so it was nice to come home and have some success."

Pallister got his start as a fastball pitcher by whipping balls against his farmhouse and it grew from there.

"My fundamentals weren't great and I blew out my shoulder when I was 26 or 27 and had to learn how to pitch again, and it was really hard to do. For a pitcher to change their style of pitching it's very unlikely you're going to get back to the form you had before, but for me, my best pitching was after the injury," admits Pallister. "Before I was throwing hard, kind of brute force guy, but I had to learn how to pitch and locate the ball, change speeds and move it around, and it became more of an art than just brute force."

"Learning how to pitch and coming back from that injury to play with good friends in Portage, playing in national championships and international championships were just fabulous experiences."

Teammate Ferdi Nelissen recalls the Diamonds having some really great runs of winning ball, saying the team went to world championships on multiple occasions. He remembers one matchup specifically.

"When we played Decatur, you have to remember our budgets were basically nothing, and they were bringing people in from everywhere like New Zealanders, Canadians, Americans, they brought em all," Nelissen says. "We beat them here in Winnipeg in a tournament, they went 123-4 that year and they lost to us ... the team was 90 per cent Manitobans and was really good."

Pallister adds his fastball career really came full circle. "You start in a country school with all your friends you know, then you're picked up to play in areas like California, New Zealand, Arizona and other places, and then you come home to play with friends again," the premier says. "Portage is a great city, but it's a smaller city, and when you're beating teams from big cities like Calgary and others more often than not, it's really special. It was fun, and I hope some good memories were created for the players and the fans that supported us when we were playing."

Nelissen says Dewis should enter the Hall of Fame as a player as well. "He's always nominating everyone else, but he played in the Western League, and was an all-star when it first started out. He was a hell of a shortstop, a guy I grew up watching and thinking this guy can play the game."

"You really learn from guys like that and we ended up playing middle infield together for a couple of years."

The Diamonds will be inducted into the 2017 class of Softball Manitoba’s Hall of Fame. The ceremony is set for early May in Portage with other local fast pitch players being inducted.