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Laval Liberty Panthers win their season opener
Coach disappointed with lost points from numerous penalty calls
Published September 9 , 2009
By Martin C. Barry • TLN

Photo: Martin C. Barry
The Laval Liberty Panthers (in blue) won their season opener against Quebec City’s École
secondaire Pointe Lévis at the Gerry Dattilio Playing Field.

After spending some of the past summer training at Laval Liberty High School’s Gerry Dattilio Sports Field under the watchful eye of head coach Steve Alexandre and supporting staff, the Laval Liberty Panthers had a promising start to the new football season in their opening game on Aug. 28, only to suffer a setback part way through because of penalties, although they ended up winning the match.

Unsatisfying win
“It was a satisfying win, but not the way it turned out,” Alexandre said in a post-game interview with TLN. Although the game went well for the Panthers up to the first quarter, and the final score against École secondaire Pointe-Lévis from Quebec City was 36 – 21, the coach had gone in with higher expectations, considering all the work he and the team put in during the training camp in August, only to see much of that dashed in the second half when penalties calls set them back.
“A lot of penalties in the second half,” he said. “We had two touchdowns called back. Other big plays called back. Already, just two touchdowns that’s 14 points right there.” Although Alexandre runs a training camp for the Panthers each summer, this year he had decided to do things a little differently by combining it with a private football training program he also operates, called Game Prep.

Training camp
“Instead of just training the kids from the school, we’re training kids from Laval as well as from Laval,” he said. According to Alexandre, combining football trainees coming from different backgrounds into a single camp paid off by producing a kind of synergy. “I bring in some guys going to college or university and who have aspirations to go play pro. By linking them to my boys, it gives them an idea of where they could be in a few years.”

As for the quality of play in the season’s first game, Alexandre said the Panthers “played very well. It’s just the penalties.” Asked whether that might have been a sign the players were a little overenthusiastic or getting ahead of themselves, Alexandre suggested the officiating hadn’t been up to the usual snuff and that he called a meeting for last week with one of the refs in the hopes of straightening it all out. “He came by the school and we discussed the whole thing.

Penalties undeserved: coach
“It’s really the hype. The boys were excited and aggressive, and of course they wanted to play in their first time out this year. So that kind of got in their heads and they went on and got penalties.” All the same, Alexandre insisted, “After watching film with the referees, I can say we did not deserve all those penalties. I mean there was some stuff that our boys did do wrong, but not all of it, and that referee was there to clarify things to us.” Since it was the first game, he expected a valuable lesson will have been learned and “the number of penalties will go down because now they know.”