Road games for the London Beefeaters tend to be roughly two hours away. The Ontario Football Conference schedule normally takes them to Windsor or Toronto or St. Catharines. They may travel to Ottawa on alternating years.
In less than two weeks, London will play their third away game of the season, but this one will take them a little further. The Beefeaters are headed to Calgary for a game that will count in the standings, against the Calgary Colts, one of the top teams in the Canadian Junior Football League.
How do you go from a two-hour bus ride to a five-hour flight?
Well, for the answer, you really have to deconstruct how far the Beefeaters have come under new head coach, Chris Marshall.
The alarm bells have been ringing about participation in sports in Canada for a few years now.
You can check out data from Statistics Canada.
Or even more recent information from Paradigm Sports, whose motto is, “Don’t be a kid’s last coach.”
Blame the cost. Blame the threat of injury. Blame social media and the hours that pre-teens and teenagers spend in their rooms, on their beds and on their phones.
Football bears the brunt of all of those and more. Many parents don’t like the idea of their children playing football. Every play that doesn’t result in points on the board, means somebody got knocked to the ground. Oftentimes, it’s more than one somebody.
That doesn’t appeal to them when it could be their child feeling the knocks.
Picture that and all of those other factors, rolled up into a big snowball, heading down a hill toward you at a pretty high rate of speed.
That’s what it was like to be in Marshall’s shoes as he started this season.
The Beefs have been around since 1975, but find themselves lined up near the back of the pack when it comes to the attention that is paid to them. They get smothered by other teams and leagues pretty quickly in the city of London.
They play in the Canadian Junior Football League and need to find players between the ages of 18 and 22, who are not playing at a Canadian University but still have the time and the desire to play football.
That’s a pretty small slice of a pretty small pie, given the numbers that show the huge decline of sports participation even into high school that Canada is experiencing right now.
Marshall was able to take a look at his roster heading toward the start of his season and he was able to count 15 names. A hockey team could make that number work. It would be more than enough for a basketball team. A few too many for a 4 X 100-metre relay team.
In football, 15 players is called an automatic default. You just can’t do it.
Undaunted, Marshall got to work, reaching out to high schools and other parts of the London football community.
“We decided we needed a reboot,” said Marshall. “We established this by changing the culture, starting with the players we look at. (We altered) what we expect from the players and how we as a management and coaching staff prepare and how we prepare the players for the games.”
A mandate like that looks great on paper, but if you don’t have the bodies to execute it, you are like a fantastic beach without a lake or an ocean beside it.
And the first few days may have felt just like that for Marshall and his staff, especially given where they’ve set their own bar.
“Operationally we put a goal at 55 players,” Marshall admits with the conviction that he must have used when talking to prospective Beefeaters.”
Finding 40 new players made for some tough math, but one by one, the roster increased and the Beefeaters currently have 54 bodies on their team.
Marshall credits the football community in London for making it possible.
“London is considered, if not the best, probably in the top two of football communities in all of Ontario.”
Of course, that presents another challenge.
He notes, “Every University coach is here already, trying to get as many players as possible.”
Still, he got the players he needed and got off to a start that he could have only dreamed of, going 3-0 to begin the season.
This past weekend provided the Beefs with their biggest test and their first loss as they were knocked off by the Windsor AKO Fratmen, who represent one of the strongest CJFL programs in the country. They have been to the past four championship games and have won three of them.
That’s where the Beefeaters want to get to and their trip out west is just another step and Marshall is quick to add some real perspective.
“Not a lot of our (players) have even left London. They have never been on a flight before. So, the experience of travelling as a team, taking a flight out there, staying in a hotel and playing in a CFL Stadium… it made a huge difference in our recruiting.”
It was an idea that was proposed by the league and the Beefeaters ran with it.
“We worked really hard in fundraising,” says Marshall. “We’ve had some corporate sponsors (within the community). We are hoping to establish relationships that will allow us to do this on an annual basis.”
The Beefeaters were able to make it happen without raising fees from last year to this year.
The game is on the schedule for Sunday, Sept. 24 at McMahon Stadium, so the countdown continues, but it isn’t just a vacation or a chance to live like a professional team on planes and hotels for a weekend.
“It will allow us to understand what we are competing for on that National scale,” Marshall said. “We want to grow to compete for national championships against teams like the Calgary Colts and the Saskatoon Hilltops.”
They will get an up close look at the Colts very soon.
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