Neil Gaskell has been a baseball coach for 26 years, and while it was not in his plan to still be out on the diamond for early morning practices and hot summer games, he couldn’t pass on the opportunity to coach at the provincial level with his son Keegan to close out his career.
This will be Keegan Gaskell’s fifth year coaching with Baseball Nova Scotia’s 15U program and his third year as the head coach. Meanwhile Neil has spent the last four years as the team’s Chef de Mission, which is the person who leads any delegation for the team at an international competition.
But this year Neil will be joining the team at the 2026 15U Boys Ray Carter Cup Championships as the hitting/infield coach, making his national-level coaching debut.
“Keegan is in a two-year commitment so we’ll probably do it again next year but that is probably it for me,” says Neil. “So, it is a great way to wrap up your coaching career, to say you have done it and to do it with Keegan and to do it at a national level is awesome.”
The tournament takes place between Aug 20-23 in Summerside, Prince Edward Island, and Keegan says his expectations for their team are high.
“At this particular national tournament for Baseball Canada, Nova Scotia’s never won a medal. They’ve finished fourth on multiple occasions, like about a decade ago they finished fourth. But this group has got these high aspirations of wanting to compete for a medal.”
Keegan’s first introduction to the sport was through his family. Between his dad’s love of baseball and attending his older brother’s games and getting to be the bat boy, the passion for the sport was all around. He would go on to play the game himself but switched gears after having shoulder surgery in his late teens.
“I’m a super competitive person, so I needed something to fill that competitive void and decided to get into coaching that year when I had that shoulder issue. And then it was almost like love at first sight at that point. I wanted to be involved really, really quickly and I took on some big roles in my early 20s, and now I’m in my fifth year of doing this,” says Keegan.
Meanwhile, Neil started playing club baseball in Liverpool at age 10, when registration cost just a toonie. Neil says baseball was a big thing in the area, and they even had a bingo to raise funds to pay for their coaches. When he was graduating high school, they offered him a full-time coaching job, which Neil took and did for three summers.
He would then go on to coach his own kids for many years, saying he knew Keegan would be a great coach one day.
“I think as you’ve coached, you see players that have high IQ and just a love of the game and then naturally you could see them gravitating to coaching. I definitely saw him as a coach and someone who would be very successful,” says Neil.
While this summer is the first time the father and son duo are coaching with Baseball Nova Scotia, they have teamed up before coaching club teams. Neil says teaching, understanding and building relationships with players is a strong suit for them both, but in some ways, he finds himself learning from his son.
“On the tactical side, strategy side, how to get the most out of players, how to motivate them, I think there’s elements where he’s actually better than I am,” says Neil.
For Keegan, he says it is great to have someone who he is so in sync with.
“When I’m out coaching in the field, when our team’s on offense, to have somebody like him on the bench. For him to be thinking along the same lines as me and to communicate with each other from a distance, it’s super beneficial to have that,” says Keegan. “I’ve had a lot of great assistant coaches over the years, but this is clearly my favorite one.”
They both say baseball, like any sport, comes with wins and losses, ups and downs, but in the end the most rewarding part has been the life-long connections they’ve made and the positive influence they’ve had on people’s lives.
“I spent six years coaching 18U AAA,” says Neil. “I’ve written letters for people, for scholarships to university. I’ve probably done a dozen job references. And so it just shows you the relationships and the impact you had on their lives.”
And the impact goes both ways. Neil says the stories he can tell from witnessing athletes overcoming adversity, both on the field and off, are just amazing.
While the Gaskell’s have kept baseball in the family, they aren’t the only ones. In all their years of coaching, Keegan talks about forming relationships not just with individuals, but families. He and his dad have coached a lot of brother duos, including within the 15U program. Keegan can recall past national competitions where he saw his players’ younger brothers throwing the ball around on the sidelines and thinking they would go on to play for the team one day.
“You know, as I get older, and I’ve been doing this for a decade now, it’s really, really fun to see them grow up and become mature, developed young men, it is absolutely the most rewarding part.”
For the 2026 15U Boys Ray Carter Cup Championships, the team will be placed in a pool of five and must finish in the top two to move on to the medal round. In addition to the Gaskell’s, the coaching staff is rounded out by Jamie MacLean, Nolan Galloway and Ken Lenihan.
Nova Scotia’s first game is on August 20, 2026, at 9:00 a.m. against Newfoundland and Labrador.
