Bulldogs ready to compete
The Sir Winston Churchill Bulldogs senior football program took a step forward in 2019 with a 30-29 double overtime victory over the Greater Fort Erie Gryphons to advance to the Niagara Region High School Athletic Association Tier 1 championship game.
The fact that a banged up Bulldog squad got thumped by A.N. Myer Marauders in the championship didn’t dampen the enthusiasm of what the squad thought it might achieve in 2020.
Unfortunately for Churchill and every other high school sports team in Ontario, the COVID-19 pandemic shut down everything.
“We were really building for next year (2020) and our team would have been full of veterans,” Churchill head coach Peter Perron said. “We lost a lot of good kids through graduation and that is the same for every school.”
The Bulldogs are ready to start climbing the mountain once again.
“We are trying to be as competitive as possible with what we have and move from there,” he said. “We are feeling some stuff out, who are going to be our linemen, our centre, etc., but we are blessed that we have numbers at pretty much every position.”
At the team’s training camp at the end of August, an average of 32 players were out each day. In practices this week, Perron has 55 players in camp, 21 who are of junior age and the rest are seniors. Like a number of schools coming out of the pandemic, Churchill will be running a varsity squad this year and putting its junior team on hiatus.
“Some of those (junior) kids are good enough to play up and start up and to have a team of 21 at junior with injuries and safety, we have decided to run a varsity team.”
The varsity team will be bolstered by a large number of players who saw game action during their Grade 9 year in 2019.
“We didn’t have football last year but they have had senior experience,” Perron said. “Now they are Grade 11 and the experiences they had and what they were exposed to getting in a championship game against Myer was phenomenal. They beat us up in that game but we understand what it takes to get there.”
That experience has Perron optimistic about 2021.
“You can never predict whether you can win it all or not but most years I say we are going to be competitive and we are going to be competitive this year.”
In three-down football, quarterbacking is crucial and the Bulldogs will be strong at that position with the return of 12B student Ryan Cormier.
“He has grown taller, he has gotten stronger and he has been in the touch football league they were running this summer and they did fairly well. His arm is good,” Perron said. “We have four key 12Bs and for our school that is great.”
The 18-year-old St. Catharines resident came back for this 12B year mainly to play football
“I was really looking forward to it (2020) and then Corona happened and we weren’t able to have a season,” Cormier said.
Cormier suffered a sprained knee in the semifinal win over GFESS and was unable to play in the championship game.
“It was very hard to watch.”
He has been working hard to prepare for this season.
“I have been working out pretty much every day, doing cardio, weightlifting and stuff like that,” he said. “I am hoping we go undefeated and win a championship but that is a lot to ask for.”
Cormier describes being back on the football field as amazing and he can’t wait for the games to start. He enjoys the whole gridiron experience.
“It is a way to meet kids, get close to your peers and have a good time.”
Perron is blessed in 2021 with his biggest coach staff in years. It includes: former Western quarterback Donnie Marshall; former plater Gary Washuta; Glen Nielson; former player Eric Nielson; Bob Petrie, a retired coach from the Collingwood area; defensive coordinator Scott Hill; and, Brad Anderson, a former coach with the Niagara Raiders Canadian Junior Football League squad. He also has former player and former CFLer Jeff Finley as an occasional guest coach.
“It’s great,” Perron said. “Some years I have only had three people.”
Training camp is going well.
“We are focusing on everything,” Perron said. “We are doing what we have done in the past but there are a lot of new twists. So have fun with us.”
He is pleased to see that a lot of the players have returned to football in good shape.
“There are still some athletes in the school that I am still poaching at. I haven’t even done my eligibility yet because even today I have another kid that I am dressing.”
