The Okanagan Sun are confident again.
No longer reeling from a rare three-game losing streak, the perennial contenders and defending B.C. Football Conference champions are coming off a convincing win over the Langley Rams in their regular-season finale.
The Sun then got to enjoy that 44-24 victory — which saw Okanagan’s offence break out for six touchdowns — throughout a bye week in preparing for today’s rematch in their playoff semifinal. Kickoff is 1 p.m. at the Apple Bowl in Kelowna.
“We’ve definitely fixed a lot of things and we’re only getting better, so it’s looking really good,” said Michele Vecchio, a three-time All-Star offensive lineman out of Rutland. “It was nice to get the ball rolling again and I think we’re only going up from here.”
The offence, especially, is riding high now — finally.
“All year, offensively, we felt like we were kind of underachieving. We felt like we left a lot of points on the field every week,” said Foster Martens, the first-year starting quarterback from the University of Manitoba. “So it was nice to tap into some of that against Langley, but I think that was just a glimpse of what our offence is capable of.
“We’ve got in some good practices here in between, so we’re feeling confident.”
“When Foster is confident, the whole team plays confident,” added first-year head coach Ben Macauley.
There’s that key word — confident.
“During that three-game stretch where we lost a few, we lost a little bit of that mojo,” admitted Martens. “More mentally than anything, it was huge for us, and definitely a needed confidence boost at this time of the year.”
Now, though, it’s about not getting overconfident.
“We’ve learned a lot,” said Macauley. “We kind of had this false sense of how things were going when we were 6-and-0 (to start the season). As much as you’d like to say ‘we didn’t get overconfident about that,’ you still miss a lot.
“The same problems we had when we were winning were what we had when we were losing, they are just magnified and all of the sudden you’re talking about who’s on the chopping block rather than celebrating a win.”
It’s a balancing act between the highs and lows. The ultimate high would come if Okanagan could string together a three-game winning streak now — thus earning the right to host the Canadian Bowl national championship game in November.
One step at a time, of course.
The Sun aren’t getting ahead of themselves — that’s for sure.
“It’s tough to face an opponent three times in a year. In any sport, the more you play a team, the more familiar and the less you can rely on what happened last game,” said Macauley. “It’s important for us to keep that perspective, and also not measure against them, but measure against ourselves.
“Is that the best football we could have played? We felt like we could have added a couple more touchdowns on the score and held them to a shutout. So there were certainly things to work on. It’s about taking those positives, and also saying ‘we can be better.’”
More of the same and the Sun should advance to the BCFC championship game against the winner of Saturday night’s other semifinal, which had the Westshore Rebels of Victoria hosting the Nanaimo-based Vancouver Island Raiders. That result was not available at press time.
“We expect to be performing like that,” Macauley said of his team’s blowout over Langley. “With the talent we have and with the experience we have, we should be playing like that.”
That sure sounds confident. Yet, there was also a sense of cautious optimism.
“They’re going to try to adjust to some things that we got them on last time,” Martens said of the visiting Rams. “We’re well aware of that, but fundamentally, if we stick to our rules, we know what we’re capable of.
“As long as we’re getting the ball into our athletes’ hands, I think things will go good for us again.”
“It’s hard to beat a team twice in a row,” echoed Vecchio, “but we’re pretty well equipped and we’ve been practising really well all week, so it’s looking good.”
There will be nerves today, but the Sun should be more comfortable than last time out against Langley. Sure, the stakes are higher, but the pressure has been relieved — at least a little.
Besides, that already felt like a playoff game.
“We were playing for that home-field advantage,” noted Martens. “We’re really tough to beat at home, so it was big for us getting that win. We’re confident going on the road too — we beat them in Langley last time, so it’s not like we felt we couldn’t do that, but our best shot at winning is when we’re playing at home.”
As for that losing skid, well . . .
“Depending how deep we go in playoffs, no one will remember that three-game losing streak,” said Martens. “This is the part of the year, the point in time, that is the most important and we can still go far.”
“It’s all about battling adversity and how you react to that, and how you come back from it,” added Vecchio.
