OFC THUNDERBIRDS CRAVE OFFENSIVE LIFTOFF

Soaring high again?

Absolutely.

But high scoring right now?

Not yet.

“A work in progress,” Forest City Thunderbirds assistant head coach Chad Asselstine said after the Ontario Football Conference varsity team’s season-opening 4-1 victory over the Chatham Cougars last weekend.

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“We lost a playoff game last year 1-0. I was joking with (offensive co-ordinator) Matt Snyder, saying, ‘you’re killing me here. You’ve got to get us some points to work with.’

“But we were in the red zone four times and picked off twice. We’re moving the ball. The offence is there. You can see it. We just need to have that finish.”

Four years ago, it looked like the Thunderbirds might be a finished franchise. Another league went awry. Head coach John Darnell parked the T-birds in the garage for a summer.

He made adjustments, changed circuits and went with a more youthful model.

Now, in his 40th season coaching football, Darnell has a busy pigskin production line again. There’s four teams in the OFC’s various teen-age brackets — varsity, junior varsity, bantam and pee wee. On June 12, the T-birds will hold another all-day football quadruple header at Westminster Secondary School.

“It’s my way of still teaching,” Darnell said. “We’ll have two teams practice one night, then two more the next. Every night, there’s something going.”

Asselstine, the former Western Mustang, was part of that resurgence.

A strong coaching crew is laced with university experience.

“It’s such a close-knit organization,” Asselstine said. “There’s been different leagues and there’s four teams now. But back when there was just the junior varsity team, to show the kind of loyalty some of these other guys had, instead of playing somewhere else, they’d show up every week and cheer us on.

“Everyone works hard. We just want to go out on that field and represent London the best we can. That’s what we’re looking for here.”

In the fractured world of London football, Forest City is a great example of being able to work together and co-exist.

To get into the OFC, Darnell needed the local junior team — the Beefeaters — to approve their inclusion. They managed to do it while maintaining their separate identities.

“We have our own ways of doing things,” T-birds GM Bill Tsioros said. “We wanted to be in a league that was competitive and we wanted to field strong teams, but we didn’t want to create any illusions. We had a lot of players try out but we didn’t keep everyone. Someone asked why did you only take 54 players — there’s no league rule about it. But that’s the number we can fit on a bus.

“We don’t want to take anyone’s money and have them stand on the sidelines. One thing I’ll say about John’s teams, if he’s up big, he’s going to empty the bench and if he’s being blown out, he makes sure the last guy plays.

“Not everyone does it that way.”

There are all kinds of different rumours what summer football will look like next year after a more streamlined approach is ushered in. Will the Ontario Varsity Football League, which includes the London Falcons, end up co-existing apart from the OFC or morph into another massive league?

Right now, the Thunderbirds’ varsity team has bigger fish to fry, facing the Sarnia Sturgeon in Chatham-Kent on Sunday.

And Snyder? Don’t worry about that offence. He comes from serious point-scoring stock.

His brother Steve, an ex-Thunderbird and Canadian university standout with St. Francis Xavier last fall, is now lighting it up overseas with the Osnabruck Tigers in the German Football League.

It’s the ultimate football lesson.

Keep pushing forward, commit to the journey and who knows where you’ll end up?

Photo: Forest City Thunderbirds’ Taylor Boomsma, left, Chris Tsioros and Jake Van Horik are part of a defence that held the Chatham Cougars to one point in their season opener last weekend. (CRAIG GLOVER, The London Free Press)

FOOTBALL: London team won opener but scored only four points after tossing interceptions deep in enemy territory
By RYAN PYETTE, The London Free Press
Last Updated: June 4, 2010 8:19am

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