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Outlaws wrap up successful season

September 14, 2017   ·   0 Comments

By Brian Lockhart

The Orangeville Outlaws Football Club honoured its own with an awards day at Monora Park to celebrate a successful season.

The Club fielded two teams in the Ontario Provincial Football League this season – the first year they have competed in that league.

The Junior Varsity team finished the season in fifth place in the League standings.

In the Bantam Division the Outlaws had a .500 regular season before barnstorming though the playoffs to win the championship over Clarington in the final game held in St. Catharines.

The day awarded players for outstanding performance and volunteers, coaches, and executive for all their hard work through the season.

“Obviously it’s fantastic for our club development,” said Outlaws president John Davis. “Our centre has been very competitive. This is our sixth championship in the last five years and being the Bantam team which are one of the smaller, younger groups, it means our future looks good.”

The Club is already looking forward to next year and has already started getting the word out for players to register for next season.

“The executive wants to get ahead of the game. This year our numbers were a little low compared to previous years so they want to jump out ahead of some other sports and see who’s interested to come

out and play football,” Davis said. “The players we had this year really wanted to be there. Also this year we put in place a house league for some of the younger players who couldn’t play on the rep teams. I think we’ve driven the interest in some of the younger kids which feeds our older age groups.”

The big story this year was the Outlaws Bantam championship win.

The Bantams knocked out the first place Toronto Jets in the semi-final then rose to the occasion in the final to bring home the championship cup to Orangeville.

The team was led by head coach Jim Walsh and assistant coaches, Chris Thain, Sean O’Keefe, Peter Van der Veen, Alex Iozzo, and Owen Thain.

“I had a couple of people approach me today to remind me that around week one, I was telling everybody that I thought we had a team that could win it all if we kept working and believed in ourselves,” said coach Jim Walsh. “We had a conversation with the kids – if you guys keep working hard, stay devoted, and keep learning, we had the talent here if you work together.”

The Bantam team had ten first year football players on the squad.

“We have the kids that I’ve been with for three or four years – we came up short last year – to them it meant a lot more. I think we saw in the Toronto game that there was a lot of emotion after the game. I think they realized we just beat the first place team and we can actually do this. Those were the kids that we had an 0-8 season one year, we had a 4-4 season one year, we went to the championship last year and lost, and here we are again. We had a great coaching staff. We downloaded everything we knew on the players and they absorbed it. The new kids really excelled. We got lucky with a good group of new kids.”

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