(Story by Marco Stoovelaar)
    Five teams in race for Final Pre-Season Tournament
Nederlands
 TILBURG (Neth.) -
The exhibition softball-season went underway on Saturday (March 9) with Day 1 of the annual international Pre-Season Tournament, which is organized by Roef!.
All games all played indoors with Sporthal Reeshof and Sporthal De Blaak, both in Tilburg, being the playing sites.
Ten teams are participating in the twelfth edition of the tournament, including three foreign teams, being Eagles Praha (Czech Republic), Bonn Capitals (Germany) and Hoboken Pioneers (Belgium).
Host Roef! and Twins Oosterhout are the lone two teams that will play in the Golden League this season.
There are three teams from the Silver League: Onze Gezellen, Red Lions and UVV.
Completing the field of participants are DVH and Roef! 2.
On Saturday, fourteen games were played at the two indoor-halls in Tilburg.
On Sunday, the games for the final ranking will be played, but preceeding them are some crucial games in the two pools.
In Pool A, both Red Lions and Roef! are unbeaten.
However, Red Lions has won three games, while Roef! won two and played a tie.
One of these two teams will advance to the Final.
On Sunday, at 10:20 in Sporthal 'Reeshof', the two teams will face each other and the winner will reach the Final.
Red Lions, which last season promoted to the Silver League, today won against Onze Gezellen (4-0), DVH (5-1) and Eagles Praha (3-2).
Roef! opened the event with an early morning-game at 9 AM against the Czech squad, which ended in a 3-3 tie.
Thereafter, the host nipped DVH (1-0) and Onze Gezellen (2-1).
In Pool B, there are three candidates for the Final.
Twins Oosterhout and UVV both are unbeaten.
Today, the teams opened Pool B against each other and that game ended in an 1-1 tie.
Hereafter, Twins outscored Roef! 2 (8-1) and Hoboken Pioneers (4-0).
UVV went on to win against Hoboken (9-1) and Bonn Capitals (5-0).
On Sunday, both Twins and UVV have one game left.
Twins meets Bonn and UVV will close against Roef! 2.
When both teams win, they will end in a tie for first place and as the head-to-head game also ended in a tie, a run-difference rule will come into effect as a tie-breaker.
However, when Twins and UVV both end up losing their game on Sunday, another team can move into first place.
Roef! 2 is 1-1 after Saturday and has two games left.
The team will open on Sunday against Hoboken, then closes against UVV.
So, in case the two favorites both would end up empty-handed and Roef! 2 wins twice, it will advance to the Final.
Last year, the tournament was won by Terrasvogels.
(March 9)
Scores of Saturday's Games
Complete Schedules Exhibition Season, Regular Season and More
Preliminary Rosters Dutch Golden League as updated on March 8
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