from The Age

Australia's elite women baseballers will enter next week's international women's tournament at Geelong as firm favourites to ensure an all-local final, but uncertain about how foreign rivals will respond to recent Australian victories.

The Australians caused a sensation in early September when they won the gold medal at the women's world series in Florida, defeating Japan 8-6 in the final. The United States and Canada also competed.

Starting on Monday, those four teams plus the Aussie Stars - a development squad - will begin a seven-day, 25-game tournament at the newly built Geelong Baseball Centre.

After Australia's success in September, Matthew Sheldon-Collins - the Victorian Institute of Sport's head baseball coach, and coach of the Aussie Stars next week - expects the locals to be more than competitive and hopes for a one-two playoff between the two Australian sides.

"It's great for Australia to host an international tournament," Sheldon-Collins said.

"Given our past record we'd like to think we'd do very well. The unknown quantity, I guess, is, if you understand America and Japan which are very big countries population-wise, then all of a sudden Australia's gone out and won the gold medal and they'd say, 'Damn, we can't have this'.

"They may have pumped a bunch of resources into it which is what we just don't know, and it's always an unknown quantity. But we would expect to be very competitive next week and we'd certainly be looking for our first team and the development team playing off in the final," he said.

The large contingent of Victorians in the national teams will tonight have their last training session in the form of an all-star game at Melbourne Ballpark in Altona.

"This is the classic with Australian sport, where compared to the world market we have a very small population and we do very, very well, and women's baseball is going to be exactly the same," Sheldon-Collins said.