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Junior A Northmen start training – planning on a short season

June 24, 2021   ·   0 Comments

The Orangeville Junior A Northmen have starting training and try-outs now that the provincial restrictions have been lifted to allow sports teams to begin practice.

The Northmen have been taking advantage of the outdoor box facility at the Orangeville Lions Club Sports park on Dianne Drive.

Players break up into groups of ten to keep in line with current COVID-19 protocols and there is no hitting or contact allowed.

“We’re hoping that our league is going to have a ten game schedule this year,” explained Northmen head coach Bruce Codd at practice on Thursday, June 17. “A couple of weeks ago it didn’t look like we were going to have anything. Our league was one of the amateur sports that was granted an exemption to have a competitive season. We’re hoping that in the end or middle of July we’ll have a three or four week season where we get ten games in and have an Ontario championship. We won’t be competing for the Minto Cup like we normally do.”

The Junior A national championship, Minto Cup was cancelled for the second year in a row. The announcement was made by Lacrosse Canada several weeks ago, and at the time they announced cancellations of several other championships including the Junior B Founder’s Cup.

The Minto Cup was supposed to be hosted by St. Catharines – they will retain the right to host next year.

“We’re happy that we can get out here,” Codd said. “We’ve been going three days a week – Sundays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays. Hopefully we can get to that second stage where we can get everybody on the floor at once.”

If a season does get underway, it is likely restrictions won’t allow for fans in the building. The A’s normally draw a pretty big crowd for their home games at Tony Rose arena.

“We’re hoping we can stream the games so people can watch them, but I’d be surprised if we had people watching games (live) this year,” Codd said. “Obviously we had a lot of turn over from our team in 2019. Of that group, we had about 13 guys that would have been in their last eligible year, last year. So they have graduated now. The fact that we can [offer] anything right now is a blessing. I called around 40 kids – I figured that maybe with a year off, some would say ‘no’, but every single kid said ‘yes.’ The fact that every kid said they wanted to come out and be a part of it was huge.”

Junior A Club president, and former president of Orangeville Minor Lacrosse, Cara Burleigh, said the easing of restrictions on sports prompted the club to quickly get active.

“All these training sessions have just started,” she said. “The province allowed us to do ten people for training – they opened it up so we could do outdoor training. We needed to get all these athletes back out there. The minors are going to start next week with the same sort of thing with drop-in training. There will be sessions to gauge interest and see how many kids want to come. Each age group [is] going to have a certain night where they can come out and do the same sort of thing – outdoor training.”

For now, the A’s and the Ontario Junior A Lacrosse League will have to wait for the province to give the green-light for games to take place.

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