Life as a Rookie (Week 16) Part 19 of 23

BC @ Edm Although I was still in my first year, I was no longer a rookie! I didn’t feel like one anymore and did not make the same mistakes that I had in previous weeks. Also, I felt I learned how to practice like a pro and overall didn’t have that wide eyed rookie look. I felt better during practice with the number change as well as the fact that I had started making plays. I started to feel like I belonged, a feeling which didn’t exist for me all year. In 1 on 1’s I saw drastic improvement. Now being able to get my hands on receivers, I was winning a few more than earlier in the year. In addition to all this, coach put me back onto the special team. I also made tremendous progress in terms of my practice style. Moving into the 3rd part of the season, that worry of being sent home was lost. It was around this point where I truly started believing in my abilities to play at this level. For weeks and weeks I had been playing passive, tentative and even scared at times. This prevented me from being able to react and adjust to the faster pace of game. At Concordia, the motto was high risk, high reward! In order to play a game with such high stakes, your calculation had to be exact. Previously, the game had been moving so fast it was really hard to make decisions. I had to increase the speed at which I processed information before and during a play. Finally it didn’t feel like football was on fast forward, the game started to slow down. In a game where high risk is necessary the margin for error is so small that one bad calculation and you could be the “HIGHLIGHT OF THE NIGHT”. I wasn’t in a game situation, however, so my bets were all in on every single play. Now that I had put in my time, there were no large consequences for my actions. Just reacting and letting it all happen made me feel much more at ease and successful than earlier in the season.

Game Day. With the season series battle on the line, this game was important. The game was a close match, back and forth until the 4th quarter. We really shot ourselves in the foot with assignment errors. This opened the door for B.C to take a commanding lead in the game. Not only did we lose the game to B.C., we also lost the season series. A blocked field goal positioned us 3 points shy of coming out on top of the game series. Esks lose (Score)