The St. Albert High Skyhawks have a chip on their shoulders in Friday’s rematch with the Leduc Tigers.
The division two Miles conference semifinal is the second tilt in nine days between the metro Edmonton football teams after the Skyhawks tamed the Tigers 20-13 in the last game before the playoffs.
“It was a hard-fought battle on both sides and we wanted it more than they did,” said Gabriel Forbes, a gregarious Grade 12 nose tackle and right tackle for the 6-1 St. Albert Catholic High School squad. “I do believe we are the better team and we have a good chance to go to the final next week.”
Kickoff is 5 p.m. at Larry Olexiuk Field and the winner will line up against the Archbishop Jordan Scots (6-1) or O’Leary Spartans (3-3-1) in the Nov. 1 championship at 7:30 p.m. at Commonwealth Stadium.
The Skyhawks were still smarting from the 14-13 loss to O’Leary the week before playing Leduc (3-3-1).
“We were upset after coming off a perfect season. We were coming off the loss to O’Leary so we wanted to show the world who we are,” Forbes said. “There was a blog saying Leduc was going to beat us by 14 and we were upset. We hung it up in our locker room and we were all looking at it. We were upset that the world, or the city anyway, had forgotten who we are and what SACHS football is because we feel we get underestimated a lot and it took five wins for people to start noticing that we were a good football team and then one loss and it was all gone. It made us upset.”
The Skyhawks were missing five players in key positions against O’Leary and with a few more healthy bodies in the lineup defeated Leduc even without Grade 11 quarterback Ewan Vanderheide and Jackson Ganton, a Grade 11 game-breaker at slotback and defensive back who is a bonafide MVP candidate in the Miles conference and arguably the best high school football player in St. Albert this year.
“We don’t want to be the team that is like we’re four stars and the rest. No. We are still 12 strong on the field. It takes 12 men to win so we’re not making excuses. Anybody that is on the field knows what to do and everybody gets trained the same way so we lost as a team,” Forbes said.
“When you miss five starters it’s really tough,” added Sam Johnson, the 2017 Metro Athletics Coach of the Year in the Miles. “When you lose a player like Jackson Ganton to injury, you would like to have a kid like that playing for you, but it’s also an opportunity for other young men to step up. Derek Dubrule, a Grade 10 kid who has never played before, stepped up and played very good in the last game at halfback for us.”
The semifinal marks the second and most important season for the Skyhawks.
“We’re happy where we’re at but that 6-1 means nothing now. You've got to win every week now,” Johnson said.
Leduc is no pushover as the Skyhawks discovered last week in St. Albert.
“The toughest thing in sports is to beat someone two in a row. They’re going to be looking at the film and we’re looking at the film. It’s going to be a very challenging game but I’ve always been very confident with our team this year,” said Johnson, noting Leduc, “Gave us a little bit of trouble. They’re very quick. They’re not a great match up for us. We might have been better matched up against O’Leary or someone that comes right at you. We’ve got some big linebackers, Jared Granoski and Evan Selzler and Matt Swecera that are great coming at you, but they’re not really as fast laterally and Leduc darts in and out of the holes and around the edge.”
As for back to back games against the same team, “It’s good in some ways because we know who we need to worry about,” Forbes said. “Obviously we know they have some athletes on that team. They have some guys that can hit the edge and can burn us if we make some mistakes.
“But we don't want to worry too much who they are, we want to worry about the mistakes we made as a team and the things we can do to fix us as a team. The perfect game doesn't exist but everyone wants to strive for it so we want to aim for that; be better as a unit, be better as a team and be 12 men on the field as one team.”
After the playoffs, the Skyhawks kick off the Tier III (450 to 749 students) provincial noth playdowns Nov. 10 against the Mighty Peace league rep in St. Albert and the winner will host the north final. Nov. 17. The Alberta Bowl championship is Nov. 24 in Fort McMurray.
In week eight of the Football Alberta Tier III rankings, the Skyhawks are No. 3 and the Whitecourt Cats are No. 8 as the only Mighty Peace team in the top 10.
This is the seventh Tier III appearance since 2011 for the Skyhawks, the north finalists the last three years with losses of 35-10 in 2017, 61-0 in 2016 and 28-0 in 2015 to the Holy Rosary Raiders of Lloydminster, ranked No. 2 behind the Cochrane Cobras, champions of four-straight Alberta Bowls and five in the last six years.
“We like to practice that nothing is guaranteed so we don't like looking at provincials as guaranteed as they are. We do get to play in them, but we don't want to be sitting here like if we lose we’ll come back in two weeks and keep going. No. This is still do or die for us. We haven't won a (metro Edmonton championship) banner since ‘06 (in the Miles when the metro league was separate from the Edmonton public league) and we want to bring it back to SACHS so this is do or die. This is it for us and then provincials are another story in a few weeks,” said Forbes, 17, who casts a large shadow on the field at six-foot-four and 285 pounds.
