Flyers football grounded no more
There was a lot of joy among Eden football players when it was announced on social media the school would be holding workouts on three Mondays in August.
“I was so happy,” said Braden Van Slageren, a Grade 11 student who was a member of Eden’s junior team in 2019.
To say the 16-year-old missed football is a huge understatement.
“It was really tough,” he said. “School became less of a social kind of thing and football was one of the things that would make us want to come to school and learn. Sports was another way that we were able to meet more people. We made a lot of friends through sports and we all missed that a lot.”
Van Slageren used to play house league soccer in Port Weller and unlike club sport athletes, he had no other options for sports during the pandemic.
“I just keep on working at my job. I had that to keep me busy and that was pretty much what my summer became,” he said. “During the school year, we had fitness classes and nothing else.”
Returning to the football field was a joy for him.
“It is amazing and the feeling comes right back to you,” he said. “I didn’t realize that I had missed it so much until we started running out on the field with the other players. It was great. I missed the camaraderie and the intensity of the game itself.”
Van Slageren quickly became acclimatized to football again.
“I was sore and I thought I would have been really exhausted at night but it was really good to be back out there,” he said. “That helped out a lot, just the energy on the field.”
This past Monday was the third and final workout before school starts. On the first week of workouts, 21 players showed up. Twenty-seven athletes showed up the following week and this past Monday 21-22 showed up. Twenty players were fitted for equipment at the final workout.
“I’ve been getting messages from kids for the last three weeks. Because we planned all of this really late, a lot of them told me they want to play but they can’t get there until school starts because of vacation and workouts,” Eden head coach Jeff Webster said. “We have got a lot of great response and I would anticipate we will have somewhere between 34 and 38 kids by the end of next week.”
Webster has loved the response to the workouts.
“We have had large numbers, partly because kids want to play football but also because they want to be outside doing stuff and this is what they got right now,” he said. “I don’t know what else there is.”
About 75 per cent of the athletes that have shown up for the workouts had previously football at Eden.
“There’s 25 to 30 per cent who have never played a down of football in their lives. There’s a couple of kids coming in to Grade 9 who really look good and we are going to have to keep the reins on them just because they are only going into Grade 9 and we are only going to have a varsity team,” Webster said.
Having only one team at Eden made sense in 2021.
“We are only doing a varsity team because of the number of kids, the number of coaches and no one knows what the season will look like,” Webster said. “It is still being pieced together at the scheduling level among the more senior coaches and they can deal with that. When they give me a schedule, we will go and play.”
Webster had taken a gradual approach to the training.
“The first week we were doing some footwork and throwing balls around. Last week, we did a lot footwork and we started putting in some special teams systems,” he said. “The goal we have set for ourselves tonight (Monday) and for the four days next week when we can actually get out here is we want to work on special teams again and start teaching kids how to tackle. Then we need to get the rest of the kids fitted for equipment and everything organized in terms of who is here and getting them registered.”
Helping Webster, the team’s offensive coordinator, with the squad are: defensive coordinator Kent Wakem; defensive assistant Paul Somsel; teacher rep/defensive assistant Drew Chapelle; and, offensive assistant Rick Smith.
