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Football season is in full swing across Saskatchewan as the Prairie Football Conference (PFC) begins another season this weekend.
The Regina Thunder and Saskatoon Hilltops both open their seasons on the road on Sunday.
Thunder head coach Scott MacAulay is leading the team for a seventh season, but he remembers the team’s beginnings 20 years ago when he was a player for the inaugural season.
“It just seems like it was yesterday,” he said. “It was disorganized chaos, but everybody that was there loved the game and loved each other. There was a lot of excitement because we were starting something new.”
After working his way through the coaching ranks, MacAulay was named the Thunder head coach in 2013, the same year his team knocked off the Hilltops en route to a PFC and Canadian Junior Football League (CJFL) title.
With another year of turnover, including the loss of most of the offensive line, MacAulay is tempering expectations until he learns more about his team.
“We’re really not concentrating on saying we want to win the championship or we want to be that number one team in our conference,” he said. “We’re really starting to concentrate more on the process.”
MacAulay believes Sunday’s game against the Edmonton Wildcats will teach him plenty about his team.
“I’m excited to get this first game going and see where we end up. I think that we could win the first game by 60 points, and at the same time, we could go 0-8. It’s one of these teams where I’m not 100 per cent sure what we got yet.”
Regina’s first home game is on Aug. 25 against the Hilltops, a team the Thunder will presumably have to go through for a championship trophy.
“Every year, those guys,” MacAuley said. “They have a certain system and a certain way they play. They do everything very robotic, but they do a great job making sure they find the right players for the right positions and they coach them up.”
Toppers aiming for a sixth consecutive title
The Hilltops enter the 2019 season looking to win a sixth straight national title, and ninth since 2010.
Head coach Tom Sargeant lost all three of his starting linebackers and leading PFC rusher Josh Ewanchyna, but that doesn’t change expectations in Saskatoon.
“We lost a lot of quality, high-end players from last year, but it’s amazing how you jut plug and play, put players in and they seem to elevate their performance,” he said. “We’ll know way more when we play Winnipeg.”
Sunday’s opener against the Winnipeg Rifles will be a debut for plenty of players, but Sargeant feels they’re prepared for the challenge.
“We have a blueprint that right now seems to be working,” he said. “A lot of the systems we’re running, we’ve been doing it for 20 years. We put players into how we do it, and then we coach it certain way and our expectations are a certain way.
“Everyone thinks we’re pretty vanilla, we’re pretty basic, but our kids play fast, they play hard, but most importantly they know what they’re doing that allows them to play hard and fast.”
MVP quarterback Jordan Walls graduated, so Sargeant will be handing the ball to Tyler Hermann, who will have to play his first three games as a starter on the road.
“We must have had some people sleeping at the scheduling table, or something,” Sargeant said of the odd schedule for the defending champions.
“It certainly challenges our roster early, but on the other hand, we’re going to look at it as a way of getting a sense of what our playoff roster is going to be like at the end of the year.”
Saskatoon will return for the home opener at SMF Field on Sept. 7.
— With files from The Greenzone
