By Dan Plouffe
The Cumberland Panthers didn’t have to look far for inspiration to summon the courage for a championship effort in the National Capital Amateur Football League peewee division.
They had it right next to them in Darnell Robinson, a bit of a Rudy type of character at 5-feet tall who may not have looked out of place in one of the earlier mosquito or tyke matches.
“Do it for ‘D’ – that’s what they were saying,” Panthers coach Ian Michel says of his diminutive receiver, with a smile. “A lot of guys count him out and think he’s too small to play football, but he was always working hard. He caught a few balls this season. It was the fact that he kept working hard and kept his head up – the guys were really happy for him.”
Willy-Pierre Dimbongi a force both rushing and receiving, while quarterback Alex Lawrie was named the championship game MVP, but it was Robinson who was lifted on his teammates’ shoulders in celebration nonetheless.
“He’s just an inspiration for us all,” signals Lawrie, a middle school touch football teammate of Robinson’s at St. Peter. “It’s like, ‘if he can do it, we can all do it.'”
Undefeated Cumberland had little trouble dispatching the Orleans Bengals in the final, busting open a 14-6 game at halftime for a 36-6 victory on Nov. 3 at Carleton University.
“That was our best team effort all season,” notes Lawrie, who was an Ontario Varsity Football League all-star receiver before switching to QB last year for the NCAFA Panthers. “That was a great performance. I couldn’t have asked for anything better for our team.”
Lawrie perhaps had a little extra soft spot in his heart for Robinson because it wasn’t too long ago that he was the little man competing against bigger bodies. Growing up in Nova Scotia, there weren’t enough players to field a younger teams, so at age 8 Lawrie competed against 10- and 11-year-olds.
A similar scenario certainly wouldn’t unfold in Ottawa, where the 13-game NCAFA championship weekend featured ‘A’, ‘B’ and ‘C’ Cup contests from tyke (under-11) to midget (under-20).
“It’s a lot more competitive here than anywhere else. (NCAFA) is ranked #1 in Canada I know,” adds Lawrie, who moved to Ottawa three years ago. “It’s a very competitive game. I love it. I’m never going to stop playing football.”
That’s music to the ears of NCAFA president Steve Dean, who viewed the “tremendous” championship weekend as a testament to local football’s progress. “A lot of coaches and parents have commented on how the level of play has improved over the years at every level,” he highlights. “We’re happy to see that.”
Perhaps no club plays testament to that growth more than the Orleans Bengals, who had the most representatives in ‘A’ Cup championship games with three, followed by Nepean’s two. The Bengals earned midget and mosquito crowns, while Orleans’ peewee championship game defeat marked a major turnaround for a squad that went 0-7 last season.
“We’ve been working real hard these last few years on recruiting and building up the club,” says Bengals president Dennis Prouse. “I really credit our winter training and our ‘Be a Bengal, Not a Bully’ program – getting kids in the dome early in the year, raising a lot of awareness. We’ve been full at all our younger levels this year – that’s the first time in a long time, these last couple years.
“Now you’re seeing the dividends paying from that (in the championships).”
With Cumberland and Orleans’ success, and St. Peter and Sir Wilfrid Laurier leading the way in the high school ranks, the east end is flexing its local muscles in a big way.
“It goes part and parcel with a lot of the good coaches we have out here,” says Michel, crediting the summertime OVFL Panthers and the Gridiron Academy’s winter programs for boosting development opportunities. “We have a lot of good guys who have been around football for a long time.”
With a 48-7 performance, the bantam Myers Riders beat Nepean, as did the Bengals in a 56-39 midget final, the Gloucester South Raiders topped the East Ottawa Generals 32-12 in the tyke ‘A’ Cup final, and Jonathan Agette scored six touchdowns in his Bengals’ 46-38 mosquito victory over the Bel-Air Lions.