Founded originally in 1994 as the Victoria Rockets, we merged with the Victoria Rebels in 1998, later changing the name in 2000 to the current Victoria Mariners.
The organization was originally founded to provide further baseball opportunities for the area’s top level ballplayers looking to extend their season beyond the typical June 30 end to their Babe Ruth season. The focus then was for each of the area’s leagues to form a tournament team and compete for the right to compete in a Provincial Championship. One team would proceed , while the rest of the athletes would have no baseball during the summer. This model clearly did not speak to development.
The Rockets formed teams to compete in various tournaments in the USA during June and July, eventually joining in US leagues. As this model proved successful in developing talent, Rockets were eventually invited to join the BC Premier League, as a second Victoria franchise alongside the Victoria Rebels, with other teams in Duncan, Nanaimo and Parksville. After a year of operating the two separate teams, it became evident that the area lacked the talent to feed two teams, Rockets and Rebels merged into one organization.
The Rockets (soon to be renamed Mariners) and the BCPBL jointly decided to revert to only one Victoria BC Premier league team, The Victoria Mariners. It was felt our developmental goals for both players and coaches would be better achieved by expanding to operate two teams in the BC Minor Midget AAA League. Concurrently, Rockets had still been running teams in the 13 to 15 age group. When a number of local BC Babe Ruth organizations recognized the need to expand development into a summer schedule and joined the BC Minor League, Rockets merged their younger teams together with the governing body GVMBA. We were finally progressing on one of our goals, to bring the local baseball community closer together in building the best development program in BC.
More recently, when the BCPBL decided to expand to build a Junior developmental league, we decided to drop one of our BC Minor Midget AAA teams in favor of running a BCJPBL team, believing that a more age appropriate structure would work better for both remaining teams.
