The Campbell River Eagles Junior Bantam showed the ultimate sportsmanship Sunday.
They helped out their opponents by lending them some of their senior players and ended up getting beat 28-12.
The Ladysmith Steelers are a new team in its first year as a Junior Bantam squad. Although their Pee Wees are doing well, the Junior Bantam team has been struggling all year with no wins and they have lost players over it. But they showed up with 10 players to play Campbell River and were willing to give it a go. Needless to say, they were not optimistic about the outcome against a very strong Campbell River squad. The coaches decided to make their last regular season game fun for all the players because no matter what the outcome, it would not change the standings in the playoffs.
They didn’t want any team to fall out of the league and were willing to help in any way they can to keep a new team to the league going. So, they offered up some of their players to the Ladysmith coach to have a fun game and he accepted.
They did not just give him a few younger players, they gave him four experienced starters in quarterback CJ Foy, fullback Dakota Donaldson, and two big starting linemen Marcus Haslehurst and Mason Toner.
“This may have been a misjudgement in my behalf,” joked Campbell River coach Roger Douglas, “because those guys took it to us with Ladysmith scoring four touchdowns and four converts to our two touchdowns which were scored by Austin Donaldson playing as our back up tailback. The good part about it all was all our new younger players got to play both ways for the whole game and we got to look at fresh players for the offense.
“Once again this team made me very proud of them because when we went looking for volunteers to play for the Steelers I thought very few would want to leave and play for another team but boy was I wrong, they were all jumping up wanting to play for them so they could take on our team.”
“At the final whistle, the score was 28 to 12 for Ladysmith and there was some very happy Steeler players jumping around,” Douglas said. “As a coach it is tough to take a loss but when you see just how happy they were to get a win it makes it much easier to take.”