Vavra and Kurtz win national football title
Swift Current’s Rhett Vavra and Ethan Kurtz were still on cloud nine a couple days after helping Saskatchewan win a second straight Football Canada Cup Championship in
Kingston, ON.
The Swift Current Comp.
Colts stars helped Saskatchewan defeat Quebec 16-9 in the championship game on
Saturday. Swift Current’s
Kristie Mueller was also the athletic therapist with Team
Saskatchewan.
“It’s hard to explain for two
Swift kids that would never think we’d being doing this,” said Kurtz, 17.
“It was really exciting for the whole team. For me personally, I could try out last year and I didn’t make it,” Kurtz explained. “So I was at home watching it on my phone when all my friends were posting it up in Calgary. So just to be there this year and win it and go through… I felt like I could have been on that team last year. Just winning it this year brought everything and kind of made me feel good.”
“I have two years, because this is my first year, so I wasn’t as nervous as I probably should have been,” admitted Vavra, 15. “But it’s not an everyday thing that you are in a position to win the final game. It was nerve-wracking.
When we were up points it was an extreme high and I was like ‘Oh yeah we are going to win this.’ Then when they were pushing on our 10, five (yard line) and our defense was bend don’t break, it’s like ‘Oh how are we going to pull this off?’ When you do it’s hard to explain.”
Saskatchewan had advanced to the final with a 37-0 win over Nova Scotia on Sunday, followed by a 23-15 semi-final win over Ontario on Wednesday.
Both Vavra and Kurtz agreed that Saskatchewan played more as a team than some of the other provinces at the Canada Cup.
“We were a lot more strict,” explained Vavra. “We took our hats off at the table. We said thank you to everybody, even if it was just for the smallest things. Our team was a lot more disciplined than the other teams, even in the small things. On our special teams we worked hard, the other teams not as much. The other teams were ‘me, me, me.’ Our team was ‘we before me.’”
Kurtz added that other teams were a bunch of individuals, whereas as Saskatchewan became a team despite their different backgrounds.
“By the end of the tournament and the end of the two weeks we were all brothers. We knew we had to do our job so the rest of us could celebrate.
We fought for each other and became really good friends.
I know everyone on the team now and their personalities.
We just fought for each other.”
Vavra and Kurtz made the
South Team and then the
South and North merged for a Top 100 camp from which a 40-man roster was selected.
They estimated that approximately 170 kids from across the province were attempting to make the team.
Vavra started at wide receiver for Team Sask and played on special teams. He had injured his quad during training camp and had doubts whether he would be able to start. “I just bounced back and started.”
Kurtz was a starter in the defensive backfield. “In tryouts I was kind of moved around a lot, played both boundary and field side corner, so I didn’t really know going in where I would play, but hoping I would play. I got moved to field side.
Not a lot of action there but that means you’re doing your job,” said Kurtz, who also played special teams. “I was just happy that I was out there and could make a difference for our team.”
Kurtz will be heading into his final season with the
SCCHS Colts in September, while Vavra will enter his grade 11 season as they look to win their first league title since 1999.
“I actually learned a lot, more so about the etiquette, just to stay focused and don’t let anything distract you and that’s kind of what I want to bring to the team,” added
Vavra. “It’s not so much, ‘oh do this on the field or turn your route like this at how many yards.’ I want to make our team that when we show up everybody is scared out of their minds because we are maybe in the same uniform or we are all in unison or we are not screwing around. I think that brought us together as a team, but also made us perform better.”
“I want to bring back the drive because what I learnt is that when you have 40 guys and your staff and we all have one goal and we are all focused on that goal we can basically move mountains, for a metaphor,” added Kurtz. “I want to get our team focused like
Rhett was saying, kind of push them all to know that we have a team that could win this league. If everyone believes in that and sets their mind to that goal then I think that we can achieve it.”