The SRSS Sabres soccer team is picking up momentum and the group is coming off a very impressive weekend where they won a prestigious tournament.
Steve Rebizant is the Athletic Director and coach for the SRSS squad and before talking about the tournament, the coach detailed the hard work the players have been putting in for a while now. "Our program has evolved over the years to extend for the entire year. Not quite with the same intensity that maybe the hockey program runs with, but we start in the fall with the fall program, it's a local program that's an exhibition season. We go right from that to an indoor season, a weekly indoor league that we play at the U of M at one of their complexes. We ended this year with our own home indoor futsal tournament. We extended into our AAAA provincial season, which is a month-long attempt to get to the AAAA provincials. So, our season extends through most of the year now."
With all that going on, Rebizant is quick to praise the group for their dedication and love of the sport. "The cool thing about our program is that we have a lot of single sport athletes," the coach explains. "We have a very big school, some teenagers these days are kind of tested between work and getting into the most important athletic event that they choose. Lucky for us, we have a lot of players that are committed to soccer and they all love it. We have a couple players that play club soccer in the city, which means they play at the top level they can in their age group, but unlike other schools, most of our players don't have any other opportunity to play in their age group locally. All they have is high school soccer and they have fully committed to it, it's a wonderful group."
This past weekend, Rebizant and the Sabres went into a big event and the coach details how it went. "The Maples City Wide Soccer Tournament which has all the best teams, unlike provincials where you have to qualify from certain zones and those certain zones could be stronger or weaker. This tournament virtually has all the very best teams from across the province and it's twice the size of provincials, there are 16 teams involved. So, everybody is placed as best they can, they're judged and seeded then placed in pools, where hopefully there is some balance. We get to face some of the strongest teams. Last year was the first year of this tournament, so this being the second year, we came up B side champions both times. We played a really great brand of soccer."
Winning the tournament twice now is a big boost for the program overall but it really provides a shot in the arm for this team, according to Rebizant. "We're a group that is always building, looking to peak at the end of May or early June, whatever the provincial AAAA final is, and this really sets us up well for that process. I think for us, what a lot of people don't understand, is the city is schools of choice and a lot of students can go across town or stay in their local community or high school, but the club soccer scenario is that players can go anywhere they want to. In a lot of ways, it's all-star teams in a school now with some of them going to the top clubs. If their local club isn't that strong, three or four of them may travel to play for another club. When you assemble all these club players at school, you can almost have an all-star team. The level of soccer is much better at the high school level than it's ever been, the commitment is getting better all around. It's tough to go in between the current season once the club season starts, you're kind of fighting for players to be at practice or not be at other things, but like I said before, for 95% of our players, this is the only soccer they get, so they are happy to commit and we have them for 100% of the events, it's pretty good."
For what's coming, Rebizant says things won't be slowing down but there needs to be some work put in to find matches. "It's a very short window here, since there are no other AAAA schools in our area of the province or our zone, we kind of need to find our own way when it comes to tournaments or exhibition games. Coming up for us, we're going to host a little mini-series on May 10th, which is a Saturday, we're hosting a mini-tournament on May 16th, we'll have a few exhibition games before we take on Northlands Parkway in an inter-zone to qualify for provincials, that will happen the week of May 20-23, then we'll know if we're headed to the show."
All home matches will be at the Steinbach Soccer Park and fans are encouraged to cheer on the Sabres.