Young Marauders being forced to grow up fast
No, McMaster’s football players aren’t drinking from sippy cups at training camp this week, while watching episodes of Barney and doing finger paintings to take home to Mommy and Daddy. And they don’t have to sit cross-legged in a circle with their classmates, and raise their hand and wait for the teacher’s permission to use the potty.
But good gracious, they are young. There isn’t a single fifthyear player on either line of scrimmage. Their probable starting quarterback is a sophomore. The most-experienced unit is the defensive backs, with one fourthyear guy. First- and second-year players are scattered all through the starting lineup.
“The reality of it is, we’re so darn young it’s going to be interesting,” says head coach Greg Knox.
Yes it will.
To be clear, he’s neither throwing in the towel before the year even starts, or preparing people around here for some sort of inevitable beat-down season.
To the contrary. Knox points out that the Marauder defence last year relied on a number of inexperienced players and it turned out to be the second-best in Ontario, just behind the eventual Vanier Cup champs from Western.
In fact, while stressing he’s making no bold headline-grabbing prediction, he says his side is targeting the Yates Cup this season and believes it could win.
But as he says, this season is going to be interesting. More unpredictable than any we’ve seen in a while. Because this is uncharted territory thanks to nearly unprecedented change.
“The last two years we lost something like 14 and 12 graduates respectively,” Knox says. “So, massive amount of turnover.”
There were eight or nine new guys on offence and a half dozen on D last year. That number has flipped this time around. Combine all those new players and that’s a whole lot of first- or second-year Marauders being counted on to contribute.
Not only do these young men have to learn new systems, new terminology and new plays, but they have to get used to new teammates, new coaches and new surroundings. It’s a lot. And they have to refine their technique in the midst of doing all the other stuff.
On top of all that, they have to get stronger. Few kids right out of high school have the manstrength of a veteran who’s had a five-year head start on lifting weights. Yet they’ll be competing against those guys when the live action begins.
“For us to be competitive, we’re not going to be able to just line up and outmuscle and out-physical other teams like a veteran team might do,” Knox says.
“So we have our work cut out for us.”
It’s made camp — which began Saturday and runs until Aug. 24 — as much about teaching as about strategizing. Making sure the fundamentals are taken care of, so things are done correctly. Making sure the foundation is in place for the present and the future.
The coach says he’s happy with his past two recruiting classes. The young guys he’s brought in have been doing well. Yet he says he had to complement the youngsters with some slightly older transfers and junior football players he was able to lure to Mac.
“It was a necessary strategy,” he says. “Or else you’re going to war with 17- and 18-year-old kids.”
So what does it all mean? Knox has shown he can turn any defence into a dominant unit. But doing that once again — while building the offence and special teams at the same time — is going to be an enormous challenge this year, thanks to an unforgiving schedule.
Guelph is up first. It’s become one of the province’s powerhouses in recent years. Then Ottawa, which finished right behind McMaster last season. Followed by Western in London. Most everyone expects the team than won the national championship and lost basically nobody to graduation to steamroll everyone. After Homecoming against Toronto, the Marauders face Laurier, which hasn’t just become a terrific program, but has been Mac’s kryptonite in recent years.
Get through all that and things get a little easier. But that’s one tall order. And doesn’t give much time to adjust if things get dire.
Still, Knox is seeing the positive. Yeah, this might be the biggest challenge he’s ever faced in his decade in maroon — broken up by stints at U of T and with the Winnipeg Blue Bombers — but the other schools eventually lose guys to graduation and the CFL draft, too. They’ll have to rebuild at some point as well. Meanwhile, a year or two from now his side could be peaking.
“Short term, obviously you approach it with a little bit of apprehension,” the coach says. “Long-term, you can’t help but be extremely bullish, because if we can be competitive with this amount of youth last year and continue to be competitive this year, then the future is going to be bright.”