The Edwin Parr Composite Pacers football team went into its championship game undefeated last Saturday, and that’s the way it stayed.
The Pacers secured a 34-30 victory against the Westlock Thunderbirds on home turf and gained the title of Wheatland Football League tier two champions.
Halfway through the final quarter, the Pacers trailed the T-Birds by a few points, but the Athabasca boys came through like a finely tuned engine.
A number of penalties through the game almost caught up with the Pacers, who held a healthy 20-12 lead going into the second half but were brought to a four-point game.
“We all did it as a family. It’s just been crazy as a season. Just working together, being a unit. Nothing stops you once you’re playing as a family,” said starting quarterback Gaetano Minto, who will be graduating this year.
He said he was honoured to have wrapped up his high school career playing with “a group of guys you just can’t beat,” as well as what he regarded as “the best coaching staff in the league, hands down.”
Minto played most of the game but suffered a minor back injury near the end of the game.
“I’m fine. I’ll walk it off,” said Minto after the game.
Junior quarterback Justin Kwasney, a Grade 10 player Minto has been mentoring through the season, stepped up and delivered for the team.
“Justin, he’s a hell of a quarterback,” said Minto. “Check him out next year; he’s going to be good.”
Head coach Pete Burden was emotional at the end of the game, ecstatic with the Pacers’ victory.
He also recognized Kwasney’s future potential.
“Justin was very, very good for us all year. He’s played an awful lot of football for us. He’ll be the man for next year,” said Burden, adding he remained “quite confident” in the team whether Kwasney or Minto headed the game play.
The team has been practising relentlessly throughout the season with a strong focus and stable coaching staff.
“We worked really hard this year. All of the players worked very, very hard,” said assistant coach Terry Smith, citing “lots of conditioning, lots of game play.”
He said the Pacers knew the championship against Westlock was going to be a tough game because of the size of the players on the team.
“You can see by their game play, pushing up the field, we have trouble handling that because it’s their size,” said Smith. “So, we have to be smarter in game play. We’ve got to do misdirection; we’ve got to dig deep,” said Smith, adding after the effort his team put in, he is proud of his players.
Smith said despite the Pacers taking numerous penalties, their perseverance pulled them through.
“We just had to keep going, keep going. Just that last minute of the game, we thought we had them stopped, and they make a 40-yard pass on us, and … we’ve just got to keep going,”
The T-Birds took a four-point lead of 24-20 in the fourth quarter, but the Pacers soon regained the lead.
“We were good for a while and got real sluggish,” said Burden of the first part of the game. “We took some bad penalties, kind of put us behind a bit. We started making mistakes … we kind of got really down,”
But the coach called a time-out to refocus the team in the third quarter as the score tightened up.
“Then once we refocused … we got back on track,” said Burden, noting the challenges of beating a team multiple times during a season.
The Pacers beat the T-Birds 48-34 in Westlock earlier in the season before meeting them in Athabasca and shutting them out 42-0. Burden recognized the Westlock team as a bigger team and was glad the Pacers did not meet the T-Birds with complacency in the final.
“Game-wise, it was good. It’s very hard to beat a team three times … because we won so easily last time that it’s hard to get that mental focus,” said Burden.
The Pacers will play this Saturday in the Consolation Cup final against the Bonnyville Voyageurs at 2 p.m. at Walsh Field in Bonnyville.
