The North Battleford Comprehensive High School Vikings are the 3A provincial football champions.
They took the title Saturday afternoon over Yorkton Regional High School Raiders by a 14-7 final score at Beaver Lions Stadium.
It was a defensive duel throughout, but the VIkings got running touchdowns in the first from J.T. Lamb and again from Lamb in the third quarter, to go up 14-0, and they did not look back.
Yorkton got a late touchdown run from Brody Popowich to cut it to 14-7 with just 38 seconds left in the game, but the Vikings recovered the onside kick and ran out the clock to preserve the win.
For the Vikings it is their seventh provincial championship and their first since 1995.
Needless to say, coach Mike Humenny was ecstatic.
'This is awesome," said Humenny.
"We set some team goals on the first practice of the season. We didn't announce that publicly, but our goal was to host the provincial final on Nov. 11 at Beaver Lions Stadium. It happened. And all I talked to the guys about last night and into the pregame today was just focusing on the whole process and not just how the game was going to end up today. Obviously it ended up in our favour, and we are extremely happy about that, but full credit to our 25 grade 12s on the team, our coaching staff, all the parents here today, all the alumni -- as I'm looking around the crowd I'm seeing relatives, and I'm just extremely happy right now. I'm very, very happy."
Lamb, who scored the two touchdowns that won the game for the Vikings, was excited. "It's just an unreal feeling," he said.
"We just came out firing, our defence was just lights out all game. We were aggressive on offence. We had a couple of two and outs, which kind of sucked, but we kept our heads up, kept going."
For the most part, both offences had their challenges on the day, with Vikings quarterback Damon Dutton forced to rely on the running game from Lamb and from Zach Wolfe through most of the contest. Both the Vikings and the Raiders turned the ball due to interceptions and fumbles, resulting in scoring being kept to a minimum.
The game was played in cold sub-zero conditions, which forced the players to huddle around heaters blowing out heat on the sidelines.
"It wasn't too bad, actually. I've got on three layers right now, we had the heater" said Lamb. Coach Humenny believes, however, the cold weather conditions played a role.
"The weather played a factor today. Our big play guys had trouble today just securing the football, and you could tell just by the amount of turnovers on both sides. I know the coaching staffs probably weren't too happy about that. But once again I give credit to Yorkton, that's a heck of a football team, very well coached. We've heard a lot about them coming into this week."
The Yorkton offence never was able to get going all afternoon and after the second Vikings touchdown it seemed as if there was no stopping them. Still, the Vikings wanted even more points.
"We said about six times on the sidelines 'let's try and go put these guys away', but it was difficult to do," said Humenny. He credited Yorkton for fighting to the end.
"Credit to them, they didn't make it easy on us."
The defence came up particularly big and Humenny pointed to their effort as a highlight for him.
"To only allow one touchdown against a team that was undefeated and put up a massive amount of points in southern Saskatchewan this year, boy, I'll tell you, our defence was on fire today."
In particular, the coach pointed to the effort of the graduating grade 12s on the squad as a deciding factor.
"Those guys, they weren't going to lose today. And I give credit to them."
Photos by Averil Hall
