PREVIEW (ONT – OTTAWA): Unusual Tier 1 Regular Season draws to a close as Knights and Lions face off

The St. Peter’s Knights and the St. Mark Lions will wrap up their respective seasons on Thursday at St. Peter’s. The final regular season game will mark the end of an unorthodox year for both teams and the entire Tier 1 Division of the NCSSAA

This year St. Peter’s and St. Mark’s along with the St. Francis Xavier Coyotes and the St. Joseph Jaguars were the only teams in the NCSSAA competing in the OFSSAA division. The Knights and Coyotes are at the AAA level and the Lions and the Jaguars at the A/AA level.

This meant from day one of the season all four teams knew they would be playing in a championship game. Next week the Coyotes and Knights will face off for the AAA title, the date is yet to be determined. The Jaguars and Lions will play for the A/AA title on Nov. 14^th.

“It’s been kind of a silly season really, I mean the standing’s don’t really mean much,” said Knights Head Coach Jim Mick.

The theme for tomorrow’s match-up between the Knights and the Lion’s will be the same as all season, don’t give a way too much in case someone is watching and recording in the stands.

“It’s been bizarre for everyone. It’s hard because of the level of scouting in the league and with film it’s easy for people to prepare so it’s harder on the offenses to get thing’s going,” said Lion’s Head Coach Paul Brown.

This has been as issue for the Knights all year because they haven’t been able to get game reps on their more advanced package. The first time they might be running those plays in a game will be next week in the playoffs. Or they’ll simply have to leave out some packages because they’ve never ran them in a game.

This week both the Lions and the Knights will be working on their fundamentals to ensure their base offense and defense’s are firing on all cylinders heading into the playoffs.

“Once again it will be here’s our base D, they haven’t seen any blitzes yet and we don’t want to show too much … basically we’re getting our reps,” said Mick.

The Knight’s preparation has been different this week because they know they’re playing the Coyotes next week.

“You’re not supposed to look ahead, but we’re looking ahead,” said Mick. “We’ve got to start some insertions, okay they run this defense, or we’ve seen this player twice we need to take care of this guy, it’s things like that we’re already thinking about.”

Beyond next week’s game against the Jaguars Coach Brown isn’t too sure what the competition will have in store for the Lion’s if they can pull off the victory.

“It’s just one game at a time, obviously getting out of Ottawa is tough enough at the best of time, we just have to try and stay healthy and stay focused on trying to win that game against St. Joe’s,” said Brown.

A positive takeaway from the unusual season regardless of the outcome of next week for both the Knights and the Lions is the success of the Tuesday junior league that was run by the senior coaches.

“We’re a small school so we never thought we would be able to field a junior team and there was so much interest at the grade 9 and 10 level that we ended up with 45 kids playing junior football at St. Mark’s,” said Brown.

The Lions junior team lost by six points to Ashbury in the semi-finals last week, a game Brown said could have gone either way.

“They could have been in the championship game, so we’re really pleased with how our junior season went,” said the Lions Head Coach.

The Knights junior team had a dominant season in the Tuesday league. No one came within 40 points of them all season long. Mick is very happy with the way the season went. The younger players are integrating into the system and learning the game sooner.

“We look at what’s coming up and we have a lot of holes already filled, we’ll know what we have, so it’s been very successful in that aspect,” said Mick.

The other game in the Tier 1 division is (obviously) between the St. Joseph Jaguars and the St. Francis Xavier Coyotes, they face off tomorrow at St. Joe’s.