Team Australia lived in the present at the Asia Professional Baseball Championship at Tokyo Dome last week.

But at a tournament centered around players age 24 and under, the team also used the opportunity to look to the future. That is something especially important for a nation like Australia, which is trying to raise its profile internationally while also growing the game at home in a crowded sports landscape.

“A tournament like this is great,” Australian infielder Rixon Wingrove, told The Japan Times. “We’re getting a lot of the kids that haven’t been over here before into the experience. Heading into the 2026 WBC or the 2028 Olympics, these are the guys who are going to be on the roster. Getting this taste early on is something you can’t replicate anywhere.”

Australia lost in extra innings in its first two games — against South Korea and Taiwan — before being routed by Japan on Saturday afternoon. The Aussies then lost the bronze-medal game against Taiwan on a walk-off hit in the ninth on Sunday.

“I think it was good for our guys to gain some experience,” longtime manager Dave “Dingo” Nilsson said. “Obviously apart from the game against Japan, we lost two games in extra innings, one game in the ninth. So it shows we are capable and have the talent to be here. There are a lot of lessons for us to learn, both team lessons and a lot of individual lessons.”

One thing Nilsson hopes the team learned from its four games is that Australia belongs on the global stage.

“What I recognize is that we're good enough to play against these teams and we're good enough to beat these teams,” he said after the game against Japan.

The APBC gave the Australians a chance to see their younger players perform in a high-intensity environment.

“It’s baseball,” said Wingrove, one of a handful of Australians under 24 who also competed at the World Baseball Classic at Tokyo Dome in March. “At the end of the day, you have to hit the ball, catch the ball, throw the ball.

“But the intangibles come with it. The fans, the bright lights here in the Tokyo Dome, the media and everything. So it's about being a professional and taking that approach. And that's what we try and pass along as the guys who have been here and done that.”

Preparation, which Nilsson likes to hammer home, is something else he hopes rubbed off on the younger players. The former MLB catcher said it is hard for Australia to beat teams like Japan, South Korea and Taiwan unless its preparation is perfect.

"I do drive home that our preparation needs to be better, but until you get to an event and you see what it is you need to prepare for, it's tough to really understand that," he said. "Moving forward, I'm sure there will be a lot of lessons from this about how the players need to prepare."

The Australian baseball apparatus got a boost from the team’s performance at the WBC this spring.

The Aussies upset South Korea in their opening game at the WBC and beat China and the Czech Republic to advance to the quarterfinals alongside Japan. Australia narrowly missed out on a spot in the semifinals in a 4-3 loss against Cuba.

"It's probably the best we've done on a world stage," said pitcher Will Sherriff, who was on the WBC team.

The nation is trying to build off that momentum under Nilsson, a former Chunichi Dragons player, who succeeded Jon Deeble as skipper in 2018.

"We get to show everyone what we're capable of doing,” Sherriff said. “We're not the best players in the world, but we're a very tight group and we know we can put on a show and compete against the best."

Australia is not a baseball-mad nation like Japan. Cricket mostly reigns Down Under, and Aussie Rules Football has a following nearly as large. Baseball, on the other hand, is on a much lower rung of the ladder.

Baseball Australia CEO Glenn Williams says around 40,000 play the sport in Australia. Which means the entirety of Australia’s baseball-playing community could fit inside Tokyo Dome with seats to spare.

“We've got a lot of volunteers who run local club systems,” Williams said. “We've got kids in schools, in programs across the country, trying baseball. So we're trying our best. We put a lot of teams on the field. People love playing baseball. The baseball community in Australia is very passionate. But yeah, we want to kind of grow that community.”

Williams is a former infielder who played on the Australian team that earned the silver medal at the Athens Olympics in 2004 — as did Nilsson — and played in 13 games for the Minnesota Twins in 2005. He was named CEO of Baseball Australia in April 2021 and works in concert with Nilsson to continue to improve the performance on the field and lift the profile of the sport in Australia.

“Our team comes here and plays in a stadium that's almost like the home of baseball in Japan,” Williams said. “We're playing in front of 40-something thousand people. It's not something that a lot of Australian national teams do. It's just providing awareness of the opportunities that are involved in baseball.”

Williams said the traditional pathway for Australians in the game is to go abroad. There have been many Australians in the minor leagues in North America and some who reached MLB, most notably Nilsson and pitchers Grant Balfour and Liam Hendricks, the only Australians to make an All-Star team in MLB. More recently, there are opportunities to play in the Australian Baseball League, a winter league (though it takes place in the summer in Australia), which also hosts several NPB players each year.

“We want to perform well on the big stage,” Williams said. “Baseball is viewed as a small sport in Australia. The messaging we’re trying to give to the baseball public in Australia is that baseball is a huge global sport. It just hasn't hit its straps in Australia yet. So we're really trying to grow that.”

Playing against top competition is another way of trying to reach those goals.

“We know we want to compete against the best,” Sherriff said. “We want to be No. 1 in the world. We’ve gotta have that confidence. It’s good to play in these competitions and have that confidence going back (to Australia).”

Australia is trying to build something, brick-by-brick, and every game is important to the process. Eighteen-year-old pitcher Jack Bushell, for example, took the loss against Japan on Saturday, but the experience he gained in the process was as important as a win.

“The more that we can help the young players coming through get those sorts of experiences (the more) it will help down the track on the bigger stage,” Nilsson said.