CALGARY – The Banff Bears rugby boys’ season is over and it wasn’t one or two major contributing factors, but rather “death by 1,000 paper cuts” that slowly bled out the high school team.
Any chance of a provincial title repeat was squashed like a bug on Tuesday (May 21), when the Bears were knocked out early in the zone quarterfinals to the Springbank Phoenix, 32-5, at Calgary Rugby Union.
Alfie Phillips scored the Bears’ lone try in the dying minutes of the zones game, which mirrored a “frustrating” season for the Bears where not much fell in their favour.
“One of our coaches [Alex Boston], said it best, it was ‘death by a 1,000 paper cuts,’ ” said head coach Ian Higginbottom. “We made 1,000 little mistakes and not big ones.”
In the first 10 minutes of Tuesday’s match, the Bears controlled the ball and tempo, but were unable to capitalize on possessions. It turned into a common theme throughout the evening.
Down 14 points entering the second half, “the game was still ours to be had,” said Higginbottom.
“We were camped out in their half for 20 out of the 30 minutes [in the half], we burnt a lot of clock and kept making progress, but never really got a chance [to score],” said Higginbottom. “By the end … it looked like we could comeback, but we couldn’t punch it through and they ran out of the clock.”
In an irregularly short regular season, the Bears never got into a rhythm and ended up with a gloomy 1-2 record (1-3 total), which was Higginbottom’s worst record as a coach in nine seasons.
The Bears’ sole victory came on May 15 at Banff rec grounds, where they made mince meat of the Croxford Cavaliers in a game where scorekeeping stopped after 40-0.
The Bears’ bleak season wasn’t what the defending provincial champions expected, but the camaraderie in the sport solidifies why Banff coaches keep doing it year after year.
“The thing that made me happy … the boys laughed and smiled and had a hell of time, record or not,” said Higginbottom. “It is much more than a game.”
