The Breton Cougars have made their community proud after winning the Alberta Bowl Provincial Championship for 6 A Side Team Football.
The Cougars faced the Hanna Hawks at the Jasper Place Bowl on November 28, where they came out on top with a score of 36-16.
Coach Corey Colwell says they’ve been close to getting the championship for several years, but never attained the achievement until this year.
“To finally get through was fantastic,” says Colwell. “It was a lot of fun.”
Colwell knew the Cougars had a good chance this year when he saw that the roster had eight grade 12 students on it.
“I told the boys way back in May when we started on May 1 for our spring camp that we were trying to get into that final provincial game,” says Colwell. “That was our goal.”
The players took that goal to heart.
“The boys, to their credit, showed up for every practice. They put in the work,” says Colwell. “They got better and better.”
He says the defence did the film study, watching game plays and preparing themselves for what their opponents would bring to the game. Colwell says the offence comes down to who can block the best, and his players stepped in to do it.
Putting in the work for this season involved more grit than it did in previous seasons. With the remodel underway at Breton High School, the students have been attending classes in Warburg. After school, they would head down to the Breton football field for their practice, where there was no power, running water, or washrooms.
“It’s been inconvenient and difficult for us all year,” says Colwell.
But even to make their practices work, they worked as a team. Players took turns bringing home water bottles and filling them up for the next practice. Colwell always made sure there was a clean outhouse and also brought in a generator to use for lights on the field and in the change room.
“Nothing was convenient or easy this year,” he says.
Colwell says what makes the win even sweeter is that Breton High School is the smallest school in the league. They had 74 students to draw from, where Hanna had 240 students.
“Every time we play, we’re punching above our weight class,” says Colwell.
The team had staff and students from the school cheering them on.
“This team has worked so hard to get here. Before school practices, even in the freezing cold! With full course loads, these students spend any spare second watching football tapes, practicing and working hard to be the best,” said principal Shannon Gallant in a statement.
Now that they’ve won the cup, the team gets to keep it for the year. Colwell says they will bring it back to the Alberta Bowl next year, where he hopes they will win it again.
