The Vanier Vikings football team has seen more than their fair share of struggles in recent Rural 5A 12-Man High School Football League seasons, and for a good reason.
On one side of the field you’d have their opposition, boasting 50 or more players and all the depth they’d need to have only a few of their most talented individuals going both ways.
And then there was Vanier, with maybe 30 players and as many Grade 10s starting as they did Grade 12s, with most of those playing both offence and defence.
The results showed on the scoreboard, and while the Vikings were usually able to pick up a morale-boosting win at some point in their campaigns, contention was all but out of the question.
So this past off-season, the team had some hard conversations, with the end decision seeing the Vikings opting to join the Saskatchewan High Schools Athletic Association nine-man football league for the next three seasons.
“We met in the spring as coaches and basically talked about what would be the best opportunity for our kids to be competitive,” said Vanier head coach Ryan Gottselig. “It’s been a tough few years with our much lower numbers compared to a lot of teams in the 12-man league, so we started crunching some numbers and our enrollment fit pretty nicely with nine-man. We explored it and now we’ll give it a try.”
The Vikings have long been the smallest school in the 5A South Rural league and would have had 100 fewer students than the next smallest school in 2023 as well as half the population of Yorkton and Swift Current. Conversely, they’ll be one of the largest nine-man schools in the province.
That doesn’t mean they’re predicting instant success, though -- the Vikings will play in Conference 2A, which includes some of the most storied nine-man programs in the province's history, including Gull Lake, Maple Creek, Shaunavon, Lumsden and Notre Dame.
There’s also the fact that 12-man can be a vastly different game compared to nine-man, something the coaches are working on through pre-season practices.
“We’re kind of being challenged here as coaches trying to refine our playbooks and do some different stuff, but we’re learning as we go,” Gottselig said. “The big thing for me on the defensive side is I’m finding coverages are a lot different. Zone gets a little bit tougher to play because there are fewer guys to fill some spots on the field, so we’re playing more man coverage and stuff like that.
“On offense, there are fewer guys to get the ball to and set up some blocking schemes, so we’re using some of our old stuff as a shell but then just modifying assignments and working on a few different things.”
The good thing is that with 33 players currently on the team and a handful more likely to join up once school is in session, the Vikings have something they haven’t had in a long time: depth.
“I like where our team is at, we have guys we need in all our spots and a little bit of depth behind them, so we definitely want to finish way up there and go on a playoff run,” Gottselig said.
It all starts on Friday, Sept. 15 at 6 p.m. when the Vikings host Lumsden in the first nine-man Friday Night Lights game at Elk’s Field. Vanier is in Gull Lake the following weekend before hosting Maple Creek on Friday, Sept. 29. The Vikings are then on the road for their final two games, as they travel to Shaunavon on Oct. 6 and Notre Dame on Oct. 13.
“There are a lot of unknowns because we don’t have film on teams, which is a little bit tougher on me because I like to prep that stuff,” Gottselig said. “But going by word of mouth, it sounds like the competition is going to be pretty solid and we’re looking forward to seeing how we match up… It’s a three-year commitment and if we can rack up some hardware in those three years it would be pretty unreal.”
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