That football lives in Saskatchewan there’s no argument. For proof that football in Saskatchewan never dies, we visit Preeceville.
Shortly after Canada Day, on the eve of the Fourth of July, graduating high school seniors will clash here in a rare cross-border football game, six players from Canada lining up for kickoff against a half-dozen from the United States.
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No, too few men on the field is not Saskatchewan’s next football boo-boo. CanAm Bowl XIV, July 3, celebrates the finest in wide-open, high-scoring six-man football, a distinctly Saskatchewan version of the Canadian game, a 70-year tradition in Texas, and — running straight up the gut of North America — the sport’s salvation in small rural towns that otherwise would not have enough students to support a high school program.
On a tour of the field, a new locker room building and a sideline press box tower — all soon to be augmented with CanAm seating for 1,000 spectators — Team Canada head coach Jason Boyda still marvels at how going small has meant big things for Preeceville football. The local Panthers coach for the past nine seasons had not even heard of the six-man game until, as a centre in 1993 with Regina’s O’Neill Titans, he played in the annual north-south provincial high school all-star game. “I asked this one fellow on our team if they played 12-man or nine-man back home and he said, no, six-man. I’m thinking, OK, sure, another rural guy trying to pull a fast one on the city boy.”
Trimmed-down playing rosters were then only starting to find a place among Saskatchewan’s high schools. In 1996, Rocky Chysyk, coach at Bjorkdale School, returned from a football camp in Texas with a most brazen proposal, that of inviting the Americans up for an summer exhibition match, even though his town of 250 was so small the game would have to be played at nearby Porcupine Plain.
Canada lost, 40-22, but the CanAm Bowl was born, and has been held every year, always in Saskatchewan, from Outlook to Kelliher, and from Eatonia to Carrot River.
Football took Boyda to a national championship with the then-junior Regina Rams, a collegiate career with Minot State, his education degree, coaching positions in rural North Dakota, a year in Punnichy and finally, in 2001, to Preeceville, where nine-man football had once thrived and had since died, but where many residents never stopped longing for those fall days at the local field.
“When we started out, we didn’t even have a chin strap. I remember the first practice, asking the players if they knew the I-formation, and only a couple of the guys put up their hands. I’m thinking, ‘OK, we have some work ahead of us.’ Our field was dirt, a place used by the town for street sweepings. We had one player go down and holler in pain. He’d been stuck by a fork, of all things. So we’re out there with five-gallon buckets picking out all the debris. We were basically a raggedy-taggedy team, but we made do.”
Ah, memories — and no less than the makings of a great sports movie, now that, a decade later, the Preeceville Panthers are a perennial six-man powerhouse provincially, and the town sets to host the game’s North American showcase.
Football’s resurrection in Preeceville is a story likewise told in dozens of other Saskatchewan communities. Hometowns of the Team Canada players — Watrous, Outlook, or Caronport, for example — share a history with their American counterparts of Strawn in Texas, Otis in Colorado or Geraldine in Montana. Farm towns shrink in population, for all sorts of socio-eonomic reasons you can read in scholarly papers and hear in political debates, although primarily — and simply — because of larger machinery and smaller families. Where once four or five kids helped mom and dad farm a few quarters of land, now a family with couple or three children make their living on several sections. Schools adapt with fewer students.
Pitting Americans against Canadians in football might seem to some a flip-flop of Saskatchewan kids touring stateside for hockey — a set-up for one serious butt-kicking. Yet, after 13 CanAm Bowls, the U.S. squad leads the series by no great margin, only eight victories to five.
The Canadians do enjoy certain advantages, however. They don’t travel as far, obviously. While Team USA selects from Texas, Nebraska, Colorado and Montana only those players who are available to make the trip north, Team Canada begins with a try-out camp, held May 9 this year with 50 hopefuls at the University of Saskatchewan’s Griffiths Stadium cut down to the 24 who will dress. And the CanAm is played under Canadian six-man rules, which differ from those south of the border: Americans play four downs for 15 years, not three for 10; their field is 80 yards, not 100; the quarterback cannot rush without first exchanging the ball; the centre is an eligible receiver, and players don’t give a yard off scrimmage — no small adjustments for a team with only a three days to pull together and learn a playbook after arriving in Preeceville.
On the other hand, the Americans have a much deeper talent pool. Texas alone has more than 200 high schools with six-man programs, compared to 36 towns last fall in Saskatchewan, along with a handful in Alberta.
American assistant coach Bear Chesley heads up the program at Kress, Texas, for a school with a total enrollment of 63. “A lot of the towns could field an 11-man team but they wouldn’t be competitive,” he said in a phone interview. “It gets to the point where if a team has 11 kids and one gets hurt, that’s it, the team has to cancel the season.”
Beauty of the CanAm Bowl, says Chesley, is that it dulls a cruel blow peculiar to the sport of football. For most players, their final game as a high school senior is the last time ever in life ever to pull on a helmet. No rec leagues or company teams await in adulthood, as in basketball or baseball. A trip to Canada sweetens the memory of that final game. “We’re economically disadvantaged down here,” says Chesley. “About 95 per cent of the kids are Hispanic and I doubt many of them have been outside Texas, never mind to another country. Our plan is to rent a 15-passenger van and drive straight through day and night to Canada.”
Thanks to provincial and local sponsors, Boyda is glad to help out with the travel costs. “We know it’s been economically tough down there, and this year especially we needed to make it as easy as possible for them.” And he agrees that the CanAm, unlike professional all-star games, is tailored for all-out fierce competition, being not just the last game for many players, but the only one in which they will ever wear their nation’s colours. Spiff new game jerseys are on the way, red for Canada, and white for the U.S., with patches on either shoulder commemorating both the CanAm Bowl and the centennial of the Saskatchewan Roughriders, a sponsor.
American head coach Perry Allen of Idalia High School in Colorado is particularly pleased with the off-field activities planned in Preeceville. “We’re going up there with every intention of winning, of course. But when I played in the CanAm Bowl in Eatonia, I got to know all the guys from the high schools in the U.S., but not many of the Canadians. Now they’ve changed that, and I’m sure there’s going to be a few Internet penpals come from it.”
Not only will players from both nations bunk together at the Preeceville School, Boyda and his volunteers have organized a softball game, a golf tournament for all families at Good Spirit Lake, a pool party in Yorkton and a Friday night banquet in Preeceville. “Cabbage rolls and perogies,” Boyda promises. “I’m betting that after some of those boys get their first taste of Ukrainian food, they won’t want to go back to the states.”
On a day when his phone rings incessantly with CanAm planning, Boyda is also coaching after school, this time a practice for the Preeceville Peewee Panthers, an elementary-grades feeder team that plays a spring schedule. For a town once without football, the school now teaches the fundamentals to the youngest of players, including students from outlying communities such as Sturgis and Invermay. What minor football organizations offer in the cities, the six-man game delivers here, through school. Among Boyda’s young players throwing down in tackle drills, there could be a future Saskatoon Hilltop, a University of Regina Ram or even a Dawg or a Pole Cat, the next small-town Roughrider star. Mathematical odds say not, but the kids are having a blast, and without six-man football, the most precious thing of all would be lost, those boyhood dreams.
For Boyda, the CanAm Bowl will be his last on the sidelines at Preeceville. In September he takes a teaching job in Yorkton and returns to 12-man football as the new offensive co-ordinator for the Yorkton Regional High School Raiders. The CanAm Bowl, he says, makes for sensational send-off from Preeceville, a town that has given him a renewed appreciation of football’s place in Saskatchewan.
“It’s been said Saskatchewan is the little Texas of football. And you know, it really is.”
Your need-to-know for a football road trip to some of the prettiest parkland in Saskatchewan: CanAm Bowl kickoff is 1 p.m., Saturday, July 3. Gate tickets are $5 for adults, $3 for children. Bleachers could fill up quickly, so for the best sight lines, maybe pack a lawn chair. Website: [url]www.eteamz.com/canambowlxiv
© Copyright (c) The Regina Leader-Post
By Ron Petrie, The Leader-Post
Advocating for football prospects one story at a time.
