“Sarge” won’t let Hilltops be complacent

Hilltops HC Tom Sargeant tells it like it is.

    You have to love how Tom Sargeant doesn’t let anything slide with his Saskatoon Hilltops.

    Last Saturday, the Hilltops opened their Canadian Junior Football League regular season schedule with a 37-20 victory over the Thunder at new Mosaic Stadium in Regina. The victory was powered by the Hilltops scoring 21 points off turnovers. Besides those points, Saskatoon scored another seven points thanks to driving a shorter field due to a short Thunder punt caused by a mishandled snap.

    Sargeant, who is the Hilltops head coach, was more concerned after the contest by numerous errors committed by his side. It is common for the opening day game in any sports league to be bumpy for many reasons like the nervousness of new players or returning players getting used to new roles. Participating teams also have to get used to playing in meaningful contests again for the first time in about nine months.

    While many squads could write off a bad performance on opening day to any of those reasons, Sargeant, who has guided the Hilltops to 10 CJFL titles as head coach, wouldn’t use any of those points to take a backdoor out.

    He has a standard of wanting his team to achieve perfection each time they hit the field, and the veteran sideline boss wasn’t happen with what he saw especially with the large number of penalties the Hilltops took in the first half in Saturday’s win.
    Overall, the Hilltops took 16 penalties for 124 yards in the win over the Thunder.

    “It is not expected at all,” said Sargeant, whose club has won the last three straight CJFL titles. “It is bad coaching.

    “I saw a lot of things I don’t coach I don’t want to see. I guarantee I can’t wait to get back to business and set the tone for my expectations of how we play each and every opportunity we get when we put this uniform on.

    “This is not tolerated. You look over the last six or seven years, we’ve always been the team that has been penalized the least. That is certainly not how we played tonight.”

    You have to love the fact Sargeant expects his team to play at a high standard right out of the gate, and he tells it like it is, when he doesn’t see what he wants to see. It is also great to see the first thing he said was the coaches need to do a better job.

Hilltops HC Tom Sargeant, left, checks out a replay at new Mosaic Stadium.

    Sargeant has always been great at holding everyone accountable including himself. If he feels he didn’t do well enough in his role, he will tell you that.

    That is one of the reasons he will go down in history as one of the best coaches that has ever worked in the amateur football ranks in Saskatchewan.
    If there was a Mount Rushmore for football coaches from Saskatchewan’s amateur ranks, Sargeant would be on there with former Regina Rams head coach in the late Gord Currie, who is in the Canadian Football Hall of Fame, former University of Saskatchewan Huskies head coach Brian Towriss, who will enter the Canadian Football Hall of Fame on Sept. 14, and former Rams head coach Frank McCrystal, who should be in the Canadian Football Hall of Fame.

    Sargeant is backed by a solid coaching staff and a strong leadership group within the Hilltops players. They all know the team has to keep improving. The Hilltops have done that throughout their past, and they will get better as the season goes on.

    “We can’t rest on anything like this today,” said Sargeant. “We have to move on.

    “We have to improve and get better. That is what my coaching staff and players are going to do.”

The Hilltops return to action this coming Sunday, when they travel to Winnipeg to take on the Rifles (1-0).

Fans give Toppers new Mosaic memory

The Hilltops meet their fans in the stands at new Mosaic Stadium.

    The Saskatoon Hilltops had to have come away from Saturday’s win with a new appreciation for how great their fans are.

    The Hilltops were making their first visit to Regina’s new state of the art facility on Saturday, and a healthy contingent of supporters followed them down to the provincial capital. When the Hilltops were introduced, they ran out on to the field with a really loud ovation that seemed to catch the team a bit off guard.
    “It was unreal,” said defensive back Logan Kelsey-Stern. “There are no other words that can describe it.
    “It was just unreal how nice it was.”

    When you looked into the stands, it seemed a large number of the 1,947 spectators in attendance were wearing Saskatoon’s blue and gold colours. It seemed like at least 800 to 900 of the fans were from Saskatoon. Many in the group were family and friends of the players, coaches and staff.

    New Mosaic Stadium seats 33,350, but due to how the facility is constructed, it holds noise in. When a group of 900 people cheers, it sounds a lot louder in that park than it does in any other park.

    The Saskatoon supporters could be heard throughout the game when the Hilltops made big plays. After the final seconds ticked away on the Hilltops 37-20 victory over the host Regina Thunder, the Saskatoon supporters lined the stands on the west side of the stadium.

    The Hilltops greeted their supporters after the contest, and the scene resembled the site of when the CFL’s Saskatchewan Roughriders win a West Final on the road.
    “It makes it fun,” said Hilltops running back Adam Machart. “You come in here, and this is where the pros play.
    “It almost gives you a little bit of a kick in the butt, because you know you have to play where the big dogs play.”

    The interactions with the fans definitely made the Hilltops first visit to new Mosaic Stadium that much more memorable.

TV time would be great

Games between the Hilltops and Thunder have been great for Regina TV.

    Road trips to Regina mark the one time annually the Saskatoon Hilltops get to be on television, but you have to live in Regina or southern Saskatchewan to see them on television.

    Access 7 in Regina broadcasts all the Thunder’s home games, and they are available to any household that has Access 7 as their cable provider. Unfortunately, Access 7 doesn’t exist in Saskatoon, which means the people in “the Bridge City” don’t get to see those Hilltops visits to Regina on television. Hilltops home games aren’t aired on television locally in Saskatoon.

    Besides the fact Saskatoon residents don’t get to see the Hilltops win in Regina even on a tape delay basis, they missed seeing the thrilling comeback wins the Toppers manufactured in Regina in 2015 and 2016.

    About 20 years ago, local cable outlets seemed more inclined to share game broadcasts. The local Shaw station in Saskatoon could get tapes of Hilltops game broadcasts from Regina or other locations.

    That doesn’t happen anymore, which is too bad. Saskatoon residents would have loved to have seen those Hilltops game broadcasts that were done in Regina.

Kleiter more active in all trades

Rylan Kleiter boots a punt for the Hilltops.

    Multi-sport athlete Rylan Kleiter is talking on a larger role with the Saskatoon Hilltops in his second year with the team.

    In the Hilltops 37-20 win over the Thunder in Regina on Saturday, Kleiter handled all the punting and kickoff duties with the team. The graduate of Saskatoon’s St. Joseph High School took regular reps on offence as a receiver. On the kicking front, he was booming the football downfield.

    As a rookie last season, Kleiter, who stands 5-foot-8 and weighs 160 pounds, saw limited reps on all fronts. He turned heads in the Prairie Football Conference final last October catching a pair of touchdowns in the Hilltops 43-31 victory over the Calgary Colts at Saskatoon Minor Football Field.

    Besides being talented at football, Kleiter is establishing himself as a rising star in the sport of curling. This past curling season, he skipped a foursome to the Saskatchewan under-18 title and junior title representing the Saskatoon Sutherland Curling Club.

    You can be sure he would love to be part of another Hilltops CJFL title win and follow that up claiming another Saskatchewan junior curling championship.

Burt new face with Huskies

    On Monday, the University of Saskatchewan Huskies named Shawn Burt as the program’s new chief athletics officer.

    The role is a new one in Huskie Athletics and it mostly replaces athletic director position that was held by Basil Hughton, who officially retired on June 30. The position will be geared more to focusing on the business side of the Huskies program. Burt will start in his new role on Sept. 1.

    The Huskie Athletics Board of Trustees approved the unanimous recommendation of a hiring committee that conducted a national search for the chief athletics officer position. Burt will oversee the daily operation of the athletic department.

    The 46-year-old comes to Huskie Athletics most recently from The Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation in Toronto, Ont., where he was the chief hockey officer. The Kleinburg, Ont., product built from the ground up Road Hockey to Conquer Cancer, which raised $16-million over six years and set two official Guinness World Records. He also worked with Ryerson University, IMG Canada Limited and Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment Limited.

    Burt earned his bachelor of arts from Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. At Dartmouth College, Burt played centre for the school’s Big Green men’s hockey team for four seasons from 1989 to 1993.

    On an interesting side note, Dartmouth College is also the alma mater of Sarah (Howald) Hodges, who is the long time veteran head coach of the University of Regina Cougars women’s hockey team. Hodges was a star forward for the Big Green women’s hockey team from 1992 to 1996 piling up 75 goals and 71 assists in 113 career games.

Stars players to represent Canada in exhibition series

Mackenna Parker will play for Canada in an under-18 exhibition series.

    The Saskatoon Stars female midget AAA hockey team will be well represented at an international exhibition series at Lake Placid, New York.

    Defender Willow Slobodzian and forwards Mackenna Parker and Grace Shirley will play for Hockey Canada’s under-18 women’s team that will face the United States under-18 women’s team in a three game set on Thursday, Friday and Sunday.

    Slobodzian, who just graduated from Clavet High School, had six goals and 21 assists in 28 regular season games last season for the Stars. She will play for the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s Cornell University Big Red women’s hockey team in Ithaca, New York, in the upcoming season.

    Parker topped the Stars in scoring last season piling up 24 goals and 20 assists in 28 regular season games, and Shirley was second in team scoring with 21 goals and 16 assists in 28 regular season games. Both will return to the Stars for the upcoming campaign.

    That trio will be joined on the 24-player Canadian team by defender Taylor Kirwan of the Swift Current Diamond Energy Wildcats. Last season Kirwan recorded three goals and 10 assists in 19 regular season games.

    Slobodzian, Parker, Shirley and Kirwan were selected for the Canadian roster after attending a selection camp that concluded on Sunday in Calgary that was part of Hockey Canada’s National Teams’ Summer Showcase.

    Following the series, Hockey Canada will track players that participated in the exhibition series with their respective regular teams before naming the roster that will play for Canada at the under-18 women’s world championships, which will be held Jan. 6-13, 2018 in Dmitrov, Russia.

    If you have any comments you would like to pass along about this post, feel free to email them to stankssports@gmail.com.

Huskies in transition period

Expect more changes to come from U of S athletic program

The Huskies football team storms out to the field for a game in September.

    The winds of change are blowing through the University of Saskatchewan Huskies athletic program, and an educated guess makes one suspect the changes haven’t finished just yet.

    In stepping back to take a look at the bigger picture, it appears the wheels were in motion to make changes at the storied Huskie Athletics program long before high profile departures were announced this month. The departures include the retirement announcement by athletic director Basil Hughton on Dec. 5 that becomes effective June 30, 2017 and the announcement that after 33 years Brian Towriss was stepping down as the head coach of the football team on Dec. 19.

    News of Towriss’s departure was taken with quite a bit emotion from alums, current coaches, current players and supporters of the football program. The shock was also felt from alums and current players from the other Huskies teams as well.

    The overriding emotion was one of being upset because of a feeling that Towriss was being pushed out. I know for myself my gut tells me it was a force out too.

    Signs that the Huskies were heading in a new direction appeared five years ago, when the Sheaf – the student newspaper at the University of Saskatchewan - produced a feature in October of 2011 questioning the association local businessman, philanthropist and Huskies football alumnus David Dube had with the football program. 

    In a well-constructed piece, the Sheaf story explores the question of Dube’s influence going beyond being a sponsor and having influence on the team’s direction.

    Fast forward to April 1 of this year, the Huskies were celebrating a very successful 2015-16 campaign during the Huskie Salute annual awards night. During the 2015-16 campaign, the Huskies claimed Canada West titles in men’s track and field, men’s wrestling, men’s hockey, women’s basketball and a national championship from women’s basketball.

    The whole night felt very warm, cozy and inviting. It seemed like everything was in a state of being great.

Basil Hughton, right, announced he will retire as Huskies athletic director.

    Then in July, two of the program’s elite coaches announced they were taking a professional leave of absence for the 2016-17 campaign first in men’s volleyball head coach Brian Gavlas followed by women’s hockey head coach Steve Kook. The announcements were made within six days of each other.

    Joel Dyck is the interim head coach of the men’s volleyball program, while Robin Ulrich is the interim head coach of the women’s hockey team. Both are former players and had been assistant coaches for their respective teams.

    Normally if one head coach goes on a leave of absence for a season, no one blinks. It is a bit unusual for two coaches to depart at relatively the same time and during a period that is getting a little late in the off-season and makes you slightly feel like something is up. With that said, Kook has attended a few women’s hockey games and has been present at announcements for the Home Ice Campaign, which is raising funds for a new hockey arena on campus.

    The big news came down on Sept. 13, which Huskie Athletics entitled a “New Direction For Huskie Athletics At U of S” on a website release. It was announced that on Nov. 1 a Board of Trustees will advise and guide Huskie Athletics.

    The board consists of six community members and five representatives from the university. Dube, who is also a member of the U of S Board of Governors, was appointed as the chairperson. The board reports to U of S president Peter Stoicheff.

    When the board was announced, Dube made it clear change was overdue when he said, “Do you have the same cellphone as 20 years ago? I doubt it. I’m sure you don’t fly in a 100-year-old airplane, or a 100-year-old car. This was a 100-year-old governance model.”

    Usually, something like the creation of the Huskies board of trustees is a process that comes over a period of a number of months. When you consider when the board was announced and remember the mandate for change, you start connecting the dots regarding the moves that were made in July and the ones that came in December along with the formation of the board.

Brian Towriss’s resignation shocked the majority of Huskies backers.

    You start to wonder how much influence the Board of Trustees or a single person on that board really has.

    Will Gavlas and Kook be back? Only time will truly answer that question.

    Greg Jockims took his professional leave of absence after leading the Huskies men’s basketball team to Canada West and national titles in 2010. A year later, he resigned his post in order to spend more time to help raise his young family.

    Will other aspects in Gavlas’s and Kook’s lives move them to consider a similar choice?

    For now, you start to wonder what will be the next major move made by Huskie Athletics?

    The next move might be delayed given the fallout from when Towriss stepped down. The vocal minority that sat in the one corner of Griffiths Stadium heaping criticism on Towriss in recent years seems really small these days.

    The amount of alums that have come forward saying how important the veteran bench boss has meant to their lives has been staggering. A few fans are suggesting they won’t renew their season tickets for the football team.

    Even when I went shopping on Boxing Day just a week after Towriss resigned, I had three people come up to talk to me about him. It even distracted me on a visit I had with a family member.

    Overall, the prestige of Huskie Athletics on the national stage did take a negative hit with how Towriss’s situation played out. The athletic department overall is successful, so how much change does one want to make?

    I am sure there members of the university’s communications department who are choked that the company message track that it was Towriss’s choice to step down was widely rejected. When Towriss fumbled a bit with that question at his departure news conference, the optics showed something else was going on due to the fact Towriss had a long standing tell it like it is reputation.

    There are some, who seem like the minority, who agree with the moves that have been made on the Huskies front. On the football front, there are some that say the Towriss move was the right one looking at the team’s eight straight post-season losses.

    Some want the Huskies to make moves like a professional team or a WHL one if wins or not enough wins are coming. You make a change to go in a different direction and move on.

The Huskies have won a lot of recent trophies and championship banners.

    When the Huskies teams that are still in action resume play in the new year, all of this will be a slight distraction. Due to the pressures of managing basically two full time jobs of being a university student and a university level athlete, players are used to taking things day by day. If romantic relationships are happening, that just increases the day-to-day focus.

    When each team reaches the end of its season, then the future will be more of a distraction.

    At the end of 2016, the Huskies are looking different from the start of the year. Change might be the only consistent as the 2017 calendar year plays out. If the Huskies pile up the championship banners after the changes are made, a lot of the hurt feelings will likely go away.

    NOTES – Saskatoon Express editor Cam Hutchinson was at the press conference when Towriss announced his resignation. Hutchinson’s piece on the matter can be found right here.

    The Sheaf’s 2011 story on Dube’s influence on the football program can be found here.

Message from Stoicheff and Towriss

    It is likely a coincidence, but a message was posted from Stoicheff and Towriss on the Huskies website and communicated along Facebook and Twitter lines about an hour after this blog was originally posted.

    In the joint statement, Stoicheff publicly apologized for how the news regarding Towriss’s resignation was handled. In an eloquently written comment, Towriss said he appreciated the apology from the university president.

    Huskie Athletics has taken heat from a number of different sources about how Towriss’s departure was handled since the news came down on Dec. 19.

    My initial reaction is this will help heal things over time. Initially, there have been some immediate disappointment reactions on social media. With that said, the statement was a step in the right direction and the best course of action the U of S could take at this time.

    The statement from the Huskie Athletics site can be found right here.

    If you have any comments you would like to pass along about this post, feel free to email them to stankssports@gmail.com.

Hughton leaves friendly mark on Huskies

Retiring athletic director will be missed on U of S campus

Basil Hughton, left, watches a Huskies hockey game.

    The University of Saskatchewan Huskies won’t be able to replace Basil Hughton, but they will have to do their best to fill his void likely by committee.

    On Monday, the 60-year-old Hughton announced he was retiring as the Huskies athletic director effective June 30, 2017. He became the Huskies athletic director in August of 2008 after spending 30 years as a teacher and administrator in Saskatchewan’s school systems mostly with Saskatoon’s public system.

    When Hughton took over as the Huskies athletic director, it was a homecoming. He played with the Huskies football team in the 1970s, received his bachelor of physical education in 1977, bachelor of education in 1978 and a master’s degree in education in 1992 all from the U of S.

    Hughton returned to a Huskies program that was successful and had a great reputation on the national stage. His biggest challenge was to ensure the Huskies continued to achieve lofty goals in the classroom and in competition. Great success was achieved on both fronts.

    Under Hughton, almost 1,300 student-athletes were named to national or school all-academic teams. In competition, the Huskies won 15 Canada West championships and two national titles in the league now referred to as U Sports.

    One of those national championships came from the Huskies men’s basketball team in 2010 and the other from the Huskies women’s basketball team last March. Both were program firsts.

    All these achievements came from the fact that Hughton created a positive feeling environment.

Traditionally, athletic directors are viewed as authority figures. If you as an athlete had to visit one, you would stereotypically think you had done something wrong.

    Hughton was more like a kind second father. When you meet him, it doesn’t take long to realize he has a genuine sense of caring about the athletes in the Huskies program. He makes it a point to get to know everyone that plays for a Huskies team on some level.

    While a rookie athlete may have a good first impression about the U of S due to the recruiting efforts of a coach, the first meeting with Hughton is one of those welcome to the family type moments. You can feel there is an emotional investment and a hope that you will do well.

Basil Hughton, right, talks to a supporter at a Huskies volleyball game.

    That in itself is big, when you consider the majority of Huskie athletes are living away from home for the first time relocating to Saskatoon from some other town or city. Those athletes are taking their first steps in life as young adults, and it feels reassuring the top person in the athletics program cares that you do well.

    If an athlete needs to talk about something but doesn’t feel like telling a coach, Hughton’s door is always open.

    Right now, it is harder to be an athlete at the university level in Canada than it ever has before. An athletes’ time is stretched to the maximum due to commitments with academic studies, year round training, at times a job and maybe even a romantic relationship.

    When a Huskies athlete deals with ups and downs on all these fronts, it is nice to know Hughton is around to provide a friendly and positive presence which gives off a sense of stability.

    If you want to see the lengths Hughton will go to help the Huskies program, all you have to do is turn up on a Saturday morning at the U of S campus after a heavy snowfall. He will be out there shoveling away snow from the front of the Physical Activity Complex and the Rutherford Rink.

    If you’re a Huskies athlete and you see that, you have to be thinking if my athletic director is going to go out and do that I really need to bring it tonight.

    For me, the time it really struck me how much Hughton cares came from what I think was supposed to be a private moment. About a couple of days after Huskies men’s hockey team gritty, glue guy forward Cody Smuk passed away in June of 2015 due to cancer, I stopped to checked out the Smuk mural that was painted at the entrance of the Rutherford Rink on an early Saturday morning.

    I was alone only for a couple of minutes when Hughton pulled up. We talked for a few minutes, and it was visible he was in a moment where he was taking Smuk’s passing pretty hard. Hughton was working through his healing process dealing with the death of a member of his Huskies family.

    We both signed the mural and went on with the rest of our respective days. I came away thinking the Huskies were pretty fortunate to have Hughton as their athletic director.

    Still, Hughton’s time as the athletic director isn’t over yet.

    Last season, the Huskies had an extremely memorable campaign capturing four Canada West championships coming from men’s track and field, men’s wrestling, men’s hockey and women’s basketball. The women’s basketball team also won their national title.

    Hughton gets to go through one last winter semester, and maybe a couple more conference champions or even national championships might be around the corner. That would be the ultimate capper for a send off.

Grahams donate big for Merlis Belsher Place hoops courts

    The U of Saskatchewan Huskies continued to showcase the big donors for the Home Ice Campaign, and the two that took centre stage on Thursday have been long-time friends of the athletic program.

    During a presentation at the Physical Activity Complex, alums Ron and Jane Graham gave a gift of $4-million to support the construction of two basketball practice courts at Merlis Belsher Place. The donation will also fund locker rooms and team rooms for the Huskies basketball teams and give the university flexibility to consider developing an athletic research area in the new space.

    With this gift, the Grahams also became the largest cumulative alumni donors to the university in its history contributing close to $20-million. In their honour, the main court at the PAC will be named Ron and Jane Graham Centre Court.

    In the past, the Grahams have supported the expansion of the Graham Huskie clubhouse at Griffiths Stadium and the establishment of the Ron and Jane Graham School of Professional Development in the College of Engineering.

    The planned Merlis Belsher Place will be best known as a twin pad ice rink facility that will be the new home for the Huskies hockey teams and provide additional ice time for Saskatoon Minor Hockey and the community.

    The university is seeking the help of the community to raise the remaining $7-million towards the facility that will cost $41-million to build.

    If you have any comments you would like to pass on about this post, feel free to email them to stankssports@gmail.com.

Drug testing makes Huskies football look good

            For once, a positive drug test might be viewed as a good thing.

            Today, the University of Saskatchewan Huskies announced Jordan Arkko, an offensive lineman on the football team, has been suspended for two years after failing a team-sanctioned drug test. From a test conducted on March 3, Arkko’s urine sample revealed the presence of GHRP-2, a non-specified peptide hormone.

            The ban is slated to end on April 25, 2016 and will exhaust Arkko’s eligibility in Canadian Interuniversity Sport.

            When the Huskies football team held a spring camp in March, it was decided by team staff and school administration that all players would be tested for drugs to see if there was a drug problem on the team.

            The Huskies brought in the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport to do the testing.

            Head coach Brian Towriss had stated in the local Saskatoon media that it was important for the team to be pro-active on this front.

            That testing produced Arkko’s positive result. The Edmonton product was named the Canada West rookie of the year for the 2011 season.

            “As signatories of the Canadian Anti-Doping Program (CADP), Huskie Athletics and the University of Saskatchewan is disappointed that a student-athlete has violated the CADP terms and their code of conduct with the University and the CIS by using a banned substance,” said Huskies athletic director Basil Hughton in a statement. “The University of Saskatchewan is unequivocally opposed to the use of any banned substance, performance enhancing drugs or any other illegal substance.

“We are dedicated to educating Huskie athletes on anti-doping regulations.”

            While it is obviously sad to discover Arkko tested positive for a banned substance, it also shows the testing the Huskies players were put under wasn’t a window dressing exercise.

            Towriss, his staff and the administrators at Huskie Athletics and the University of Saskatchewan should be credited for making the bold move to test all the players on the football team.

            The exercise does reinforce the message that the Huskies want to keep their program clean, and in this case specifically, the football program. You can be certain athletes for sure on the football team and other sports in the Huskies program will think twice about using banned substances.

            Unfortunately, the reality is no sports organization will realistically be able to catch everyone that uses banned substances.

            Publicly in this case, the Huskies have to come out looking good.

           

If you have any feedback on this blog, feel free to email comments to stankssports@gmail.com.