Last Saturday was a beautiful day for football, and the Edwin Par Composite (EPC) School Pacers took advantage of it.
The team welcomed the Fort Saskatchewan Sting to Athabasca for an exhibition game, played ‘jamboree style’. Coaches remained on the field throughout the game, offering sage advice to the players as they ran the plays they have been working on during their spring workouts.
At the end of the game, Fort Saskatchewan had broken loose for 12 touchdowns, while the Pacers answered with one. But scores aren’t of too much concern to EPC head coach Pete Burden, at least not yet.
“They needed this to see where they’ve got to get to,” said Burden after the game.
“They kept trying. It would have been pretty easy to quit but they bounced back up.”
Fort Saskatchewan brought a pretty powerful squad to EPC on Saturday, and Burden hopes his players absorbed some of the lessons the game taught them.
“The size difference was the biggest thing. Their line is so big, we couldn’t control them,” he said. “We couldn’t control the line of scrimmage.”
The good news is there is plenty of time to iron out the rough patches before the games start to matter.
May workouts are simply to work off some of the winter rust and get the kids thinking about football again before breaking up for the summer. Once they’re back to school in September, the real season will begin.
And there were plenty of positives to take out of Saturday’s exhibition, according to the players themselves.
“We played our hearts out,” said one Pacer, Michael Heatherington.
“We knew they would be tough,” added another, Brad Russell. “We knew the effort we would have to bring, and we brought it.”
