Riverhawks coach joining Blue Jays affiliate in Dominican Republic

Edmonton Riverhawks hitting coaches Mark Ossanna, left, and Tanner Kirwer in an undated photo.

He’s getting called up.

Mark Ossanna, a hitting coach for the Edmonton Riverhawks who played for the collegiate summer short-season West Coast League team in its first year, will work for the Toronto Blue Jays for its Dominican Summer League squad this coming season.

The 25-year-old said Tuesday he developed a passion for coaching when he attended university at Minot State in North Dakota, specifically in hitting and player development.

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While spending some time coaching in Montana this past summer, he got to know a member of the Blue Jays personnel, which led to the opportunity.

The Blue Jays’ Dominican rookie-league affiliate plays out of Boca Chica Baseball City Complex against other major-league affiliates.

“It’s going to be definitely a change of culture, change of scenery for me, change of weather this time, probably in the right direction for me, but I’m looking forward to it,” Ossanna – who grew up in Phoenix, Ariz., and is fluent in Spanish – told CTV News Edmonton on Tuesday.

“It’s going to be quite the experience.”

Ossanna played mostly first base and catcher for the Riverhawks in 2022 and 2023, and played three years at Minot State, finishing up his NCAA career in 2024. He joined the Riverhawks’ coaching staff a year and a half ago, and kept busy year-round in Edmonton, not only with the summer Riverhawks but with the spring-and-fall college Hawks program and high-school academy players as well.

Now it’s on to the Blue Jays organization, which is exciting to the Buffalo, N.Y.-born Ossanna as he grew up following Canada’s only major-league team, given that his Ontario-born father “is a huge Jays fan.”

“When our family as a whole – I have brothers that played baseball and everything – really started getting into baseball, the Jays were the first team that my dad put us on to and that we were fans of,” he said.

“Out of all the teams that I could have ended up working for, for it to be the Blue Jays is really special to me, to my family and the people around me.”

Ossanna will move to the Dominican Republic in about two weeks and live there full-time – he’ll be in the Caribbean country over the baseball season, which stretches from spring training in February to October – but he plans to come back to Canada as he maintains a long-distance relationship with his girlfriend.

“I know she’ll be supporting me from all the way over here in Alberta,” he said. “There’s going to be a lot of FaceTime (mobile video-chat app) … but it just makes the wait worth the while once I get back up here after the season is over.”

Since the Riverhawks franchise started play in 2022, eight former players have been drafted by major-league teams and three have signed as free agents.