‘Resilience’ is their team ID
‘We needed to have that ability to fight back in games we were down,’ says veteran Mike Filer
The term gets tossed around like a cheap frisbee, and often lasts just about as long.
So it’s OK to question if there really is such a thing as “team identity” and, further, whether it’s actually important, and even further, whether the Hamilton Tiger-Cats have one.
Heading into Saturday afternoon’s back end of the Labour Day home and-home with the Toronto Argonauts at BMO Field, you could argue — and the Ticat players do — that the answers are: there is such a thing, it is important, and they’re close to defining one.
They don’t use any catchy phrases or mottos, but they hover around adjectives like resistant, elastic, tough, and, most often, resilient.
“I feel like everyone has the feeling of who and what we want to be and what we want to be considered as,” says centre Mike Filer, the longest-serving Ticat.
“The big thing we want to focus on is resiliency. We needed to have that ability to fight back in games we were down, and we didn’t show it before.
“We were losing games at critical times where we needed to capitalize or push through.”
During the first eight games of the season, over which they went 3-5 and too often couldn’t get it done late in the game, the Ticats still and repeatedly self-identified as “resilient.” Which is not, alas, how the scoreboard was identifying them.
Of late, however, that self-perception is starting to feel more like reality.
The past two weeks they’ve not let opposition big plays and bunched scoring drives, nor their own badly-timed penalties, dislocate them.
Going a bit deeper back, they’ve won three of four, including the Labour Day Classic over Toronto, and through those four games have outscored the opposition 46-11 in the final quarter.
That’s over a month on the calendar, an eternity in football and the rest of the league has been noticing. In cyber-speak, they’re trending.
There’s still a lot of important football ahead and this accelerating train of identity-development could shunt to a side rail with a loss to Toronto, but only if it’s the Ticats are beaten by the Ticats themselves. That would streak the mirror a bit.
Quarterback Jeremiah Masoli believes having a team identity is essential, but says the Ticats’ self-concept is still an ongoing process of learning new things about themselves, and reconfirming what they already knew.
“This team has a lot of heart, a lot of fight,” he says. “I think we’ve always known that we’ve had that but actually doing it when it came to doing it; a couple of times it didn’t happen.”
But now that it has happened a couple of times in a row — against Edmonton, then Toronto — is there positive reinforcement that what you think you are, you are?
“Of course,” Masoli says. “If you do something once, you know you can do it again. It does help keep the limits off you mentally. It’s a physical game but the majority of it is mental: just being able to play free and comfortable is half the battle sometimes.”
Although they are very much inter-related, there is a difference between a team’s identity and its playing style.
It’s far more nuanced but in simplistic terms, this is the general Ticat offensive-defensive style: June Jones’ offence is stretch-the-field then pound you with body shots from the tailbacks and Luke Tasker; Jerry Glanville’s defence comes at you quickly with anger and takes its chances on surrendering the odd big play. That’s the province of the coaches. The identity — what the players collectively think of themselves — belongs much more to the players.
Filer and a couple of other concerned veterans addressed the group about it a few weeks ago, saying that they lacked true identity: not as separate offensive, defensive or special teams units, but overall. They knew they “had the capability of being a top-ranked team but then we’d show signs of middle-of-thepack.”
Jones, who ultimately sets the style, consciously leaves the identity forging to the men in the locker room.
“What I try to do is create a culture so they can build that themselves,” he says. “I think the players understand that we as coaches are for them not against them.
“We’re in it with them and they’re playing for each other and once you get that, the (identity) you’re talking about develops out of it.”
For his part, Filer thinks it’s working. He’s noticed a “huge change in the mood in the locker room the last few weeks, and I think everybody in there believes we have a really good team here.
“We just can’t get in that funk and get stuck. We’ve got to be able to dig ourselves out and we are doing a good job of it.”