Spring football camp draws good numbers

The Muskies’ annual spring football camp, aimed at generating interest in the sport among elementary students still a year or two away from making the jump to high school, was a success by all accounts over its four days of practices last week.
“I was happy to see the numbers we had,” said new Muskie coach Dean Bruyere. “There was some pleasant surprises, I must admit.

“There’s some good athletes out there,” he added.
“It was the nicest week of summer we’ve had all year, and to keep those kids we had there with graduation and everything else going on was remarkable,” Bruyere stressed.
The camp averaged 25-35 kids each day, and those numbers help fill the cupboard for the new junior program which will start up this fall in conjunction with the Muskie ‘A’ squad.
“If we maintain the numbers we had in camp [in the fall], we’re laughing,” Bruyere remarked. “I’d like to see 35-40 kids out for that junior program, [but] we could probably put together a team with what we’ve got there now.”
Former Muskie head coach Bob Swing will spearhead the junior program with help from a growing contingent of coaches who have rejoined the squad for this coming season.
“It [junior program] will probably start the middle of August, and we have seven games planned with Thunder Bay,” Bruyere noted. “The schedule hasn’t been completely finalized yet, but they are going to come down here three times to play us.
“The first game will probably be the first or second week of September, and then we’ll go down there on a Saturday, stay overnight, and play two games,” he said.
“We’ll probably go there two weekends and play four games.”
Bruyere said the coaching staff will try to synchronize practices between the junior-aged kids and the high school players throughout the season.
“We’d like to keep the seniors with the young kids as much as possible,” he stressed. “It’s really a shot-in-the-arm for the younger kids when they work with the older boys.
“They think it’s pretty cool.
“We won’t keep them together for hitting drills for obvious reasons, or when we do team offence and team defence, but for the most part the rest of the drills and early part of the practice we will keep them together,” he explained.
Despite the positive response from elementary students for the camp, Bruyere admitted he still was a little concerned with the lack of participation from players who will make up this season’s Muskie roster.
“I am concerned about the [low] numbers of seniors, juniors, and freshmen,” he remarked. “We only had four-five kids out.
“Typically the high school people don’t come out until school starts, so hopefully we’ll have good numbers [in the fall].
“They aren’t thinking football, they are thinking boating and summer things,” Bruyere added. “They aren’t thinking sweating in 90-degree weather doing push-ups and things like that.”
“We more or less faced the facts that over the past few years, spring camps haven’t been that well attended by high school students because of the timing, work, and other commitments,” echoed fellow coach Andrew George.
“We did have a handful of veterans that did attend, and I know it’s safe to say that these veterans will be our leaders next fall.
“We were able to get a lot of one-on-one work with some of these guys, [and] we’re in the process of grooming another quarterback [Tibia Gerber] and putting guys into new positions,” George added.
The Muskies finished the 2008 Winnipeg High School Football League season with a 2-5 record with what was considered a peak year as far as talent was concerned.
To be fair, since aligning themselves in the WHSFL’s ‘AA’ Kas Vidruk division in 2001, the team consistently has struggled. They posted a respectable 4-4 record in their first season there, but followed that up with two-consecutive winless seasons.
The WHSFL expanded to have a ‘AAA’ division in 2006, leaving the Muskies in the ‘A’ division for one season that year. But the black-and-gold moved to ‘AA’ in 2007 and so far the results haven’t turned in their favour.
There are plenty of athletes at Fort High who would be positive additions to the team, but simply choose not to play the sport. The Muskies’ extended stretch of futility on the gridiron may be one of the main reasons for that disinterest.
Regardless, Bruyere hopes they can field a larger roster this year and right the ship towards becoming a winning program.
“We had 22 kids [last year] and it hurt us,” he noted. “You can’t run a defence versus an offence [in practice] cause you’re short guys.
“You’d like to have 30-35 kids to run full offence and defence, and get some work done,” he continued. “If you get more than that, it gets difficult to get people in, but you like to be able to sub players in and out during a game to give them a rest.”
Bruyere said this coming season will be focused on giving kids the skills to succeed down the road—with any success on the field and in the win column considered a bonus.
“High school football is repetition, repetition, repetition,” he stressed. “We would try to run through our whole playbook just for the sake of saying we did it [last year], instead of running the plays correctly.
“I think we have enough coaches where everyone is going to get direction and be coached,” he added. “That makes a difference. If you are out there and are not sure what you are doing, you get frustrated.
“These guys are going to know what they are doing,” Bruyere vowed. “There will be no deer in the headlights.”
George—one of only four coaches with the team throughout last season—said he already sees signs of a turnaround with the program.
“I see this football program stronger than it was a year ago,” he enthused. “To have any successful football program, you need players coming into high school with previous football knowledge.
“We successfully established our junior program [last] week and have this program on the right track,” George added.
But much like Bruyere, George said expectations need to be subdued because, as they say, Rome wasn’t built in a day.
“I know we’re going to take our lumps in the WHSFL this year,” he admitted. “Our goal as a team will be to remain competitive, and put the talent we do have in a position to succeed.
“Don’t get me wrong, we have some talented guys coming back, but we are severely lacking in experienced depth behind them,” he noted.