The Estevan U18 Female Viragos have been battling the heat as they prepare for the upcoming season, having cancelled a practice last week.
The official season will begin the week after Labour Day. “We have a month leading up to it for practising, getting everything in line, and then the weekend after Labour Day, we start,” said Viragos head coach Mark Tribiger.
Starting on Aug. 5, the Viragos will move into a full practice schedule, which runs three evenings a week on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday until the end of October.
Tribiger noted that the upcoming season is shaping up nicely, adding that the team will now play six-a-side compared to nine-a-side, which they played in previous years. Six-a-side is the standard for female football in Canada.
“So even with a little bit lower numbers, we’re doing a lot better player-wise than we did last year,” he said.
The football season coincides with the beginning of school, and Tribiger reminded players that they can only be on one football team at a time.
“You can only play one team by Saskatchewan athletic rules. You can’t play on two football teams at the same time. So you either have to play with what would be the Oilers, the Elecs, or the Viragos—you can’t play on two of them.”
“It actually came into play in our league a couple of times. There have been other teams that had players doing that, and Sask Sport actually stepped in.”
A couple of notable players have come out of the Viragos, with the most recent being Aurora McCutchen, who played on the U18 Indigenous National Team at the U18 Women's Tackle National Championship. Tribiger noted that becoming a top-tier player requires a lot of hard work.
“It takes commitment. If you’re not willing to put in the time and the work, you aren’t going to make a team like that. There are a lot of high-talent female players in Saskatchewan, and it’s not the kind of thing where you can go to one practice a week and not put in much effort with your hometown team and think you’ll make a team like that.”
This year, the Viragos will compete in the Prairie Girls Football League, which is made up of teams from Estevan, Moosomin, and Melville, with Swan Valley and Virden, Man., potentially joining the league. Tribiger noted that the bigger centers are sometimes unwilling to commit to the travel required to play the rural communities and prefer to do their own thing.
The Viragos are still looking for a few players to add to the team. “If anybody between Grade 8 and 12 is interested in playing, our practices are from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. at Dean Chow Field, across from Woodlawn on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Just come on out and we’ll get you suited up.”