Clearly there is something about baseball in Western Canada that speaks to Brett Melanson.

The local pitcher, rehabbing from Tommy John Surgery, was first diagnosed early in his freshman season with the Okanagan College Coyotes. Now, as he looks to return, his sights are set on joining the Edmonton Prospects of the Western Canadian Baseball League.

"A lot of the guys on my (Okanagan) team will play in different summer leagues," noted the 6'5" 21 year-old hurler. "My goal when I came in was to play in this league this summer."

If he's successful in doing so, Melanson will have overcome quite the challenge for the youngster who started on the diamonds at the age of seven.

"For me, it was kind of baseball in the summer, hockey in the winter," he said. "As I got a bit older, I saw other guys who got to go out and continue to play baseball while they were doing their school, and I thought that was awesome."

"I got to a point where I needed to make a decision, either try and really improve my baseball skills or continue to try and do both. In grade nine, I decided I just wanted to do baseball."

Working through the winter with the Baseball Academy, summers on the road with the Ontario Yankees in Ajax were all part of the mix. Ironically, it was there that the baseball gods would steer Melanson towards the pitching mound.

"We got rained out one day and we went back to our facility and I told my coach that I was going to throw off the mound, just for fun. I was always a catcher growing up."

By the fall of 2018, Melanson had shown enough with his arm to earn a spot in British Columbia with the Coyotes. "It's my first couple of months away at school and I'm trying to make a good impression on my new teammates and coaches," he recalled.

"In the bullpen, my velocity was down a little bit. But as we went on, it just kept dropping and dropping, almost 20 MPH slower. It got to the point where I couldn't even hold my glove."

"It was brutal".

"It" was a tear in his UCL (ulnar collateral ligament) and it was decision time, yet again.

"I knew that I wanted the surgery, even if it had 80% chance that it would work," said Melanson. "I told the doctor that right now, I had 0% chance of still playing. I had never had any surgery before, or even a major injury, so this was completely new to me - and it was long."

This is one story of an athlete whose world was not turned upside down by the pandemic.

"The rehab is slow and tedious," said Melanson. "But if knew that if I could get back by September (2020), no one else had played in six months either."

Able to get a few innings in during the fall prior to restrictions being tightened out west, the graduate of St Benedict Catholic Secondary School has been able to ease his way back to what he hopes is 100% health.

"This summer will be big in terms of allowing me to get some trust in my arms again to prepare me for a big fall in 2021," he said. "This has been a really good year to develop both mechanically and in terms of strength."

While it's not unusual to see pitchers back from Tommy John surgery note a slight increase in their velocity, it's not a make or break issue for Melanson.

"I never really threw all that hard," he said. "For my size, I'm not a flame-thrower. Coming out of high-school, I would throw fastball, curveball, changeup, but the changeup was almost non-existent."

"I was able to develop my changeup more this year, but my curveball hasn't been doing what I want it to. For me, I have to hit my spots to get guys out."

If there has been a silver lining to the frustration of slow rehabilation, perhaps it lies in the fact that Melanson kept busy in a coaching capacity during his down time.

"Coaching has been awesome," he said. "I've learned so much, being able to go to these clinics, even just from the players. I've been able to help them, I hope, even just a bit, but they've helped me, just by watching and learning from them."

And this summer, it's time to put all of that into practice, ideally at locations across Alberta, as the prospects hope to spend 2021 on the road, welcoming the arrival of the state of the art Spruce Grove Metro Ballpark in the summer of 2022.