The Estevan Comprehensive School Elecs boys’ soccer team will start their journey towards winning a provincial championship on home turf next month with a tough season-opening tournament in Yorkton this weekend.
The Elecs are hosting the provincial 3A boys’ championships Oct. 30 and 31 at Dana Quewezance Memorial Field. The team will be looking to improve on their showing last year at provincials in Prince Albert where they failed to win a game and that goal will begin to be realized when the Elecs start play Sept. 25 and 26 in the Yorkton tourney.
“It will be very important to the boys just to be able to play that caliber of soccer to know what to expect in provincials,” said Elecs’ co-coach Ward Tuttle about this weekend. “It’ll be a huge opportunity for them to see just what they’ll need to do in a game in order to be competitive. I think that is going to work out very well. Yorkton has a very advanced program with both their schools and hopefully we’ll be playing both of them. It’s usually a very good tournament. We’ll run with some great teams.”
Tuttle said the Elecs roster is stocked with kids ranging from Grade 9 to their core group of Grade 12s who each display a varying level of skill, experience and ability. He said their program welcomes all who want to join and that is reflected in the style of play they coach to the kids.
“We’ll probably be trying to use speed as much as possible as opposed to a finesse game,” he said. “We can feed balls up to the strikers and then try to get some shots on net and end up putting up some results through that manner as opposed to trying a controlled approach, working the ball up the field and getting our chance. We’ll probably be having to rely a little bit on the fast breaks and the quick runs by our strikers.”
With no set schedule in place, the Elecs boys’ soccer team will build towards provincials with an expected home and away series against southeast Saskatchewan schools including Weyburn, Kipling, Swift Current and possibly a few others over the next month and a bit. Tuttle said the amount of games they will play before the end of October comes down to both teams agreeing on meeting and finalizing the travel schedule. Leading up to and between those games the Elecs will continue to practise the fundamentals of footy in a formal soccer environment.
“Hopefully we can see them develop a bit more of a play set in mind,” said Tuttle. “The ability to encourage even the non-soccer players who have joined to stay with the program and grow it over the next few years, that is going to be our big goal.”
