Saint Michael football in rebuild mode

Brandon Bell had never played a down of football before suiting up for Saint Michael this fall.

He attended a few football training sessions in the summer at the Niagara Falls high school and his friend, Nathan Carter, just happened to be the son of head coach Brian Carter.

It wasn’t long before the Grade 10 student was loving the sport.

“It is awesome and fun and there is a lot of contact,” he said Wednesday, after scoring two touchdowns to lead the Saint Michael junior team to a 34-7 victory over the visiting Holy Cross Raiders in Niagara Catholic Athletic Association play.

Bell has no hesitation when asked if he would encourage others to take up the sport.

“I would tell them to do it,” he said. “It is lots of fun and you are friends with everyone out here.”

For the first time in maybe ever, Saint Michael doesn’t have a senior program this fall. Early in the school year, Saint Michael had 25-28 kids out for a senior practice but the commitment level left something to be desired.

“We had 16 to 18 kids coming out to practice and there wasn’t enough commitment to really have a senior team,” Brian Carter said. “Unfortunately we had to make a tough decision at that point to only run a junior team.”

It was certainly not an easy decision for anyone at the school to make considering its long history of fielding competitive football squads.

“We feel terrible for the kids who had a year and a half off without sports and were coming back excited to play football again but unfortunately football requires a lot of people at practice working hard,” Carter said. “If you don’t have the commitment level, it’s a long and difficult season, especially at senior with injuries and other things that come up. To be able to have a team with 16-18 kids at practice at the start of the season would be very difficult.”

There was no such problem at the junior level. There are 38 players on Saint Michael’s junior roster, including a lot of Grade 10s.

“We figure the Grade 10s can move up and filter in senior next year,” Carter said. “We will have them develop and hopefully we can built it up to have a junior and a senior team next year.”

Saint Michael improved to 3-1 in league play with Wednesday’s win and will host a semifinal game next Friday at 3 p.m., at Kalar Sports Park against either Lakeshore Catholic or Saint Paul.

Carter, who is being helped by Loris Lucchetta, Steve Roach, Jason Cukierski and Mike Girardo, is pleased with how his team has performed this year but it has been anything but business as usual.

“We are very happy but it has been a tough year because we have no one on the team who has any experience over the past two years,” Carter said. “We have had a lot of issues with formational things, a lot of silly penalties and we have had to do a lot of coaching that we don’t normally do. It has been very back to basics.”