By Pablo Medina
It will have been 219 days since the Louis-Riel Rebelles and Paul-Desmarais Patriotes qualified for their hometown OFSAA ‘AA’ provincial high school boys’ soccer championships, which kick off Thursday and run through Saturday at Millennium Fields in Orleans.
But there’s been plenty of drama since the conclusion of the local boys’ soccer season back in the fall, particularly for city-champion Louis-Riel. Following strong winds and a big snowfall during a major winter storm in February, the Rebelles’ Louis-Riel Dome collapse and was ultimately lost for the season.
Without their primary facility available, it was a big blow to the school’s sports programs, but Louis-Riel soccer head coach Joé Fournier viewed it as an opportunity for his team to prove their resilience in the face of a significant challenge.
“We were lucky in our bad luck,” Fournier reflects. “We managed to use the Hornets’ Dome, right across the street. But it’s smaller than ours. There’s no weight room, no basketball or badminton courts, so all the phys ed classes were there too. That means less space for training. Instead of two-thirds of a field, we work on a third.”
But the Rebelles organized friendlies throughout the winter and got more game action outdoors on turf as soon as they could.
Immediately after the Dome’s collapse, the team took off to Connecticut for (pre-planned) games with the University of Connecticut and Sacred Heart University.
Among their other adversaries were the Carleton University Ravens and CF Montréal Academy, and they hosted their own tournament at Julian de Guzman Park.
Fournier says their intense and structured training schedule has helped his players feel confident and prepared, and that they’ve got “the boys as ready as possible” for competition.
The Rebelles and the Patriotes booked the host association’s two berths with semi-final wins in their local league back on Oct. 30 before Louis-Riel’s 3-0 city final victory on Nov. 5.
Each team will play a pair of pool games on both Thursday and Friday. Quarter-final matches for the top two teams in each of the four five-team groups will also be played Friday evening, with the semi-finals and medal matches on Saturday.
Fournier says his goals for his Rebelles are to be competitive and play good football, inspired by the Barcelona style to play from the back, keep the ball on the ground, and control the game’s tempo through intelligent movement and teamwork.
“It’s very rare that I go into a tournament saying I want to win it all,” he smiles. “What I want is for the guys to be competitive, play positive soccer, and have a great experience. The results come when you do everything the right way.”
Louis-Riel and Paul-Desmarais also represented the national capital at last year’s OFSAA ‘AA’ championships. Both dropped quarter-final matches to the eventual finalists, with Louis-Riel losing the eventual champions from Holy Trinity of Simcoe in penalty kicks.
Fournier says that defeat hurt, but has since morphed into motivation.
“We have a big group of Grade 11s that were on the team last year, and now they’re in Grade 12,” Fournier notes. “They wanted to have another shot.”
In the Rebelles’ lineup will be future Université de Moncton Aigles Bleus players Joshua Yao, Kautchy Andji-Yapi and Olivier Roy, as well as University of Charleston-bound Maxime Bédard.
Seeing players move on the next levels of soccer is a greater goal for the Louis-Riel soccer program than OFSAA success, Fournier highlights, although he’d certainly love to send off his seniors with a final memorable moment from their high school careers.
“It’ll be nice for the boys to experience” playing in front of a home crowd, adds Fournier, who last coached his Rebelles at OFSAA in Ottawa in 2009, before Paul-Desmarais was even built.
“The girls ended up winning,” he recalls, “so hopefully history can repeat itself again, but there’s still a lot of work to be put in before that happens.”
– with files from Dan Plouffe
