BC U-18 coach happy with progress of players

Playing for a national title is a pretty enticing reason for a few hundred of B.C.’s best high school players to try and win a spot on the provincial team that will compete at this summer’s Football Canada Cup Under-18 championships.

But in the end, the most significant gains to be made in selecting the B.C. team may well be the idea to begin potential identification of players for provincial high school football teams at various age divisions.

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This weekend, the final two of four identification camps geared to bringing a total of 70 largely Grade 10 and 11 players to a final selection camp in May at Burnaby’s Simon Fraser University will take place.

In the end, a team of 40 players will be chosen to represent Football B.C. at the national championships set to run July 10-17 at Acadia University in Wolfville, NS.

Yet beyond the attempt to win a national title, the model in place to select players born between July 31, 1992 and Dec. 31, 1994 is inviting some progressive thinking from provincial coaches and executives.

In fact B.C. High School Football Association president Farhan Lalji is an advocate of widening the scope of spring provincial team tryouts to include a seperate division for players who have completed their Grade 8-9 football seasons.

“And so now, if you’ve made that final group of say 70 players, you can now start viewing yourself as a provincial team football player at an even younger age,” says Lalji, also the head coach at New Westminster Secondary. “Those kids might decide that they then want to make football their priority.”

It’s pretty simple reasoning.

B.C. has never had any kind of wide-ranging age-class selection process in place for high school football-aged student-athletes. So when a talented athlete gains provincial team status in another sport, there is often times a decision for that athlete to take his focus off football.

Thus, identifying football players as provincial team-calibre at an earlier stage in their development does nothing but inspire and encourage them to begin a training process that often times doesn’t happen now until their junior varisty or varsity seasons.

Yet already, the talent that attended camps at Nanaimo and New Westminster this past weekend was eye-opening for B.C. head coach Tom Kudaba.

“We have great kids here, and if you look at their results, they are faster, stronger and more agile than in previous generations,” says Kudaba, the former B.C. Lion and current co-head coach of Port Coquitlam’s Terry Fox Ravens. “We have players who run 4.5 and 4.6 (second) times in the 40 (yard dash) as Grade 11s,” he continued. “You didn’t have that 10 years ago. And when I played university ball (at SFU), we might have had a few guys in that range.”

All of that is to say that high school football in B.C. is among the best in Canada. Whether Team B.C. is able to show that at the nationals, where they have to make the switch from U.S. to Canadian rules, won’t be known until July. But what is most relevant here is the desire to give its athletes more reason to stick with the sport and see where it might take them beyond the prep level.

And along the way, B.C. high school football emerges the winner.

MORE CAMPS

The final two of four identification camps for selection towards the Football B.C. team which will take part in the Football Canada Cup Under-18 football championships later this summer will be held this weekend at two locations.

Saturday’s camp will run from 12 noon to 4 p.m. at Hillside Stadium in Kamloops, while Sunday’s camp will run from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at W.J. Mouat Secondary in Abbotsford.

All camps are free of charge to attend but a player cannot have attended more than one of the four camps.

Players must have been born between July 31, 1992 and Dec. 31, 1994 and a picture ID showing proof of age is required. Players must also bring a helmet, shoulder pads, mouth guard, practice jersey, football shoes and shorts.

COACHES SELECTED

Team B.C. head coach Tom Kudaba has selected a top-notch staff of assistants to try and help this province win the Football Canada Cup Under-18 football championship later this summer.

Abbotsford-W.J. Mouat head coach Denis Kelly will serve as the team’s offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach, while former UBC defensive coordinator Dino Geremia will head up the defence and coach the linebackers.

Martin McDonnell, co-head coach with Kudaba at PoCo-Terry Fox, will coach the team’s running backs.

Rounding out the staff: Kris Pechet of North Delta-Seaquam (receivers), South Delta’s Ray Moon (defensive line), Victoria-Mt. Douglas’ Alexis Sanschagrin (running backs).