CANMORE – The Canmore Wolverines are back on the gridiron, and with the re-emergence of an old league, there’s optimism that the high school football team could be fighting for a championship.
However, that is still months away and things didn’t exactly go smoothly in the team’s only exhibition game against the Bow Valley Bobcats on Saturday (Aug. 26) at Millennium Field in Canmore.
With “a lot of youth” and “lack of depth” playing in the before-the-first-school-bell match-up, the Wolverines were overpowered and over-matched against the Cochrane-based team, losing 42-6.
“We weren’t as tough [and] we weren’t as strong as we needed to be today,” said Wolverines head coach Spencer Rose. “I think it was a lot of rust, a lot of inexperience on our part, a lot of guys playing for the first time or who have played and haven’t started and we had a short bench today, too.”
Which brings the Wolverines to their next step.
“The team will be recruiting other students to join once school starts this week,” said Rose.
“I expect week-by-week improvement … we get two weeks in between now and our next game against Drum (Drumheller), so we got a couple weeks of practice for these guys to learn, have them grow and have them play football.”
The Big Sky League was re-formed this season after a hiatus in 2022. The Wolverines, along with the Drumheller Titans, Olds Spartans, Highwood Mustangs and Carstairs Kodiaks will contend for a league championship and the right to advance to provincials through Big Sky.
“I think an attainable goal for us is to win the league championship and to go win the provincial championship, but we saw it today, we have a ton of work to do,” said Rose.
“Ideally, we’ll start hitting on all cylinders by the next game and then as our game starts progressing from there we will get cleaner and cleaner and we’ll get more guys out to practice and will be deeper.”
Rose believes with some of the team’s veterans leading the charge, like defensive lineman Keithan Simeon who played on Football Alberta’s Indigenous all-star team this summer, the “eager group” of Wolverines could be a tough matchup.
Post-exhibition game, Simeon gave an inspired pep talk to the team and called for more intensity on the field.
The next game for the Wolverines is against long-time rival, the Titans, which is set for next Saturday (Sept. 9). The location is to be determined.
