By Dana DuPerron
They may have hung up their cleats for the season, but some Immaculata high school football players still have a big game left to play.
After the school’s first season of competitive football, six of the team’s 45 players were named to Ottawa’s High School Senior Bowl.
James Fowler was at home with his mother when he got a call notifying him he had been selected for the team.
“It’s very exciting,” says Fowler. “It’s a good opportunity and it was really good news for my family and me.”
O’Keif Allison-Richards, a co-captain and one of the six players headed to the game, says he had never played football before this season.
“It’s an honour to get to play and represent Immaculata,” he says.
Dave Villeneuve, Joey Lukas, Carl Jean-Pierre and Nick Zarins are the other players representing Immaculata at the Senior Bowl, on May 3.
The Immaculata players will play for the East team. The game pits high school football’s brightest young stars from Ottawa’s east-end against those from the west-end.
Brent Hopkins, one of Immaculata’s football coaches, says it’s rewarding to have his players chosen for the Senior Bowl. He watched them learn and improve over the season.
Bboth players and coaches agree the bowl game caps off an already successful season.
The Immaculata Saints made it all the way to the city’s tier two semi-finals.
Even more important, they say, the players came together as a group and learned a lot about themselves and each other.
Villeneuve has played football outside of school for 10 years. He says that playing at Immaculata taught him a lot about his classmates.
“A lot of the guys I did already know, but you got to see a different side of them playing sports and being with them in a team,” he says. “It was a pretty fun year.”
Villeneuve says the skills gap between those who had played before and those who had not was evident when practices started in August.
But thanks to the coaches, he says by the end of the season many new players had been transformed.
Fowler says the team was like a family.
Even if they did not always like each other, they always respected each other.
When the coaches began organizing the team last year, they worried that students would not be interested in football. Only about 10 students showed up to the spring camp.
But by the August training camp, a week before school started, interest had grown incredibly. There were more players than equipment.
“Someone said football and I came running,” says Villeneuve. “And I’m not usually a morning person.”
Being on the football team also encouraged players to get more involved with the school.
Some teachers worried that playing football would harm students’ grades and attendance. But Ben Seaman, another of the team’s coaches, says it had the opposite effect.
“Guys that weren’t showing up to school were coming now because they wanted to play football,” says Seaman.
Seaman credits the players’ attitudes in making the team’s first season run smoothly.
“Players who had played the game before helped the coaches out a lot,” says Seaman.
“When your leaders are leading, it’s easy to coach. Even players who hadn’t played before like O’Keif led by example. He’s a naturally good athlete and a naturally good person. You can’t replace guys like this.”
Immaculata’s football program might entice students at other schools that do not have teams to transfer.
The coaches hope this will help fill the void left by the 23 graduating seniors that the team will lose before next season.