“I kind of blacked out,” Holden Heipel says, remembering the Fanshawe Falcons’ second consecutive Ontario college baseball championship.

He remembers standing at third base as a ball flew toward right field. He remembers running toward teammates, red jerseys rushing across the grass as the crowd erupted.

A week later at Norm Aldridge Field in London, Ont., Heipel still pictures the people who filled the sidelines.

“Everybody standing up and cheering us on,” he says. “I just can picture it right now in my mind.”

On Oct. 24, sunshine warmed the diamond as golden and orange leaves framed the outfield. The Falcons formed a circle, clapping and shouting their team name.

In his red No. 12 jersey, white baseball pants and reflective sunglasses, Heipel crossed the field smiling at a teammate.

It was a long way from his childhood T-ball fields.

Raised in Clinton, Ont., Heipel says he started playing around age four in nearby Holmesville. His parents introduced him to baseball, which he chose over hockey.

By 13, he helped the Clinton Mustangs win consecutive Western Ontario Baseball Association championships. The Clinton News-Record reported he was named the association's 2019 youth player of the year. He batted .630 that season.

According to Clinton Minor Baseball, coaches remembered him arriving early, staying late, setting up equipment and picking up garbage around the bench.

Heipel told News-Record reporter Daniel Caudle he dreamed of wearing a Toronto Blue Jays uniform. Seven years later, his love of baseball remains.

“There's no other place I'd rather be,” he says.

Heipel joined Fanshawe College in 2025, helping the Falcons win their first Ontario Colleges Athletic Association championship.

In 2026, he hit .346, stole 13 bases without being caught and posted a 0.67 earned-run average, second in the OCAA. Named OCAA Men's Baseball Player of the Year, he became only the second Fanshawe baseball player to do so.

“It's been tremendous to watch him grow in skill over the season,” says Fanshawe president Peter Devlin.

Yet there is something revealing about the way Heipel talks about himself.

Ask about his teammates, and Heipel quickly praises Hunter Wright's championship home run and Owen Constantineau’s hits. Ask what they’d say about him, and he struggles.

“I don't know,” he says. “Good person maybe.”

Then he admits, “I'm not really big on hyping myself up.”

His teammates have no such hesitation.

Pitcher Neil McComb noticed his pitching, hitting and infield ability, but his determination stood out. Even while hurting, Heipel attended practice. When needed, his answer was simple: “Yep, coach, I'm good to go,” McComb says.

First-year catcher Hunter Wright became Heipel's close friend within weeks. At Wright’s house, they often joke and take a break from baseball. He also notices Heipel holding doors open, offering to pay for a friend's food and looking out for others. Those gestures, Wright says, make him easy to be around.

Wright said he once thought about baseball constantly, but his friendship with Heipel changed his perspective.

“There's more to life than baseball,” Wright now says. Even a college gold medal is only one part of life.

Their friendship is part of a larger bond among the Falcons. During the season, Heipel estimates the Falcons spent about 75 per cent of each day together.

For Heipel, that also meant balancing baseball with school. He studies General Arts and Science but sometimes forgets assignments.

“It's pretty tough. I seem to focus more on baseball in the season than I do schoolwork,” he says.

On bus rides, teammates did schoolwork and joked, singing “Rock the Casbah” after wins. McComb calls those rides some of his favourite memories. Wright says they brought all 25 players closer.

“I think every one of us could have said that we enjoyed every bit of it,” Heipel says. “We're family.”

The Falcons finished the regular season 17-1, a program record.

Heipel pitched six innings in Fanshawe’s 3-1 championship opener against Lambton. The next day, Wright’s home run tied Game 2 after Lambton took the lead. From the covered players' area, bats struck the ceiling as teammates shouted.

Heipel singled, stole second base and scored on Constantineau's sixth-inning hit, extending Fanshaws’ lead.

Then came the final out.

McComb stood on the mound, Heipel at third, as Lambton's Bryson Steckle sent the ball toward right field.

The catch ended the game.

Red jerseys flooded the diamond. Players jumped, embraced and collapsed into a dogpile. Later, medals hung against championship shirts and water splashed from blue coolers.

Heipel won championship MVP and Player of the Year. Asked which meant more, he hesitated before leaning toward the MVP for its playoff significance.

But it was another moment that stayed with him.

Steckle was also Heipel's summer teammate in Clinton. Heipel remembers seeing his friend visibly upset afterward, his eyes filling with tears.

“It wasn't very nice to see him at the end of the game,” Heipel says. “I felt it for him.”

He knew Steckle hated losing, especially against someone he knew, and understood his friend’s disappointment.

Back at Norm Aldridge Field, Wright and Heipel recalled the celebration.

“As soon as we got back here, I got goosebumps,” Wright says.

And when asked what people should know about his season, Heipel praised head coach Brian Harvey and the coaching staff for supporting players on and off the field. He also spoke about his teammates and who they were beyond baseball.

Heipel still dreams of the Blue Jays but knows reaching the major leagues is difficult. He plans another year at Fanshawe and hopes to keep playing afterward.

Thinking of his 13-year-old self, who dreamed of playing professionally without knowing where baseball might take him, Heipel considers what that boy would think of him now.

“I definitely think he'd be proud.”

And if he could tell that boy just one thing?

“Thanks for sticking to it.”

Daniel Robson had bylines in several Canadian outlets and a co-operative way with editors. What he didn’t have was anyone who could confirm he was who he said he was. Last month, the magazine Policy Options took down an article it had published under his name because it could not establish his identity. If an opinion page can publish a writer it cannot identify, every reader who relies on it should ask who checked. Readers have little trust to spare. The 2026 Digital News Report from Oxford’s Reuters Institute found that just 37 per cent of Canadians trust news overall.

In a Sept. 24 note, Policy Options editor-in-chief Les Perreaux explained the decision to pull the October 2025 piece. An editor in Turkey who had received a pitch from Robson asked Perreaux on Sept. 7 to vouch for him. Perreaux couldn’t. Robson then declined a video call, references and a CV, Perreaux wrote. The one Montreal school Robson mentioned had no record of him. The magazine also found signs that artificial intelligence software had helped write Robson’s correspondence and six other pieces he submitted.

Perreaux blamed what he called “a form of trust cascade in which publication itself becomes a credential.”

The next day, in a Sept. 25 column, the Star’s public editor, Donovan Vincent, who responds to reader complaints, reported that an AI-generated stock image had run in the Star despite the paper’s ban on AI photography. Its supplier had said such images were flagged. The problems were different, but both exposed how easily questionable material can pass through routine editorial checks.

Every Canadian opinion page should verify every contributor’s identity and background before publishing, privately and the same way every time, not only when something seems off.

The ethics guidelines of the Canadian Association of Journalists, the profession’s national association, last updated in November 2023, already point this way. They commit journalists to “make efforts to verify the identities and backgrounds of our sources.” Those who give outside commentators a platform, they add, must “make efforts to ensure that the standards of fairness and accuracy are applied.” Neither rule makes an exception for writers who seem familiar.

Perreaux wrote Policy Options will now take “additional steps” when a writer “lacks a substantial, independently verifiable professional record or appears to have relied heavily on AI tools.” But those steps kick in only on red flags, and what counts as one depends on who’s looking.

In a 2020 essay for The Walrus, journalist Pacinthe Mattar pointed out that newsroom detachment, the idea that reporters must stand apart from their stories, isn’t available to everyone. “Distance is a luxury,” she wrote. She described returning to Toronto from Baltimore in 2015 with interviews of two men describing police mistreatment, only to have her CBC executive producer ask how she could verify they had given their real names. Six years into her career, Mattar wrote, it was the first time she had seen her interviewees’ claims met with that much mistrust, and she came to see an added burden of proof on stories about racism. The producer said she routinely asked reporters for such checks.

Accuracy tells editors to verify, but fairness asks who actually gets questioned. Robson slipped through partly because a trail of bylines made him look like a standard freelancer. Mattar’s interviewees, she argues, met doubt because of the story they were telling. A rule that triggers only on red flags will keep tracking our assumptions about who looks trustworthy, because a thin record is what newcomers and outsiders have. Editors shouldn’t have to decide who looks suspicious before deciding whom to check.

Safety is a fair worry. Robson told Perreaux that threats made him unwilling to share personal information. The CAJ guidelines allow unnamed sources when there is “a clear and pressing reason to protect their identity,” and ask newsrooms to explain the need for confidentiality. Perreaux offered to keep anything Robson shared confidential, and Robson still refused. So verify privately, and tell readers it was done.

There’s another risk: a new verification rule could make it harder for newcomers to get published. Perreaux wrote Policy Options still strongly encourages first-time writers. As a Brazilian graduate student starting out in Canadian journalism, I’m exactly the writer a red-flag rule singles out. A standard check asks only for a short call, a CV and references. That takes time, but so does investigating a contributor after publication and explaining to readers why the checks weren’t done sooner.

Readers rarely get to see how an opinion page operates. If newsrooms want readers to trust what they publish, they should check every writer the same way, before anything is published.