The Sports Corner

Centennial caps off decade-long rebuilding phase at ‘09 Subway Bowl

Through the 2001 and 2002 B.C. high school football seasons, you could have probably counted the number of points the Centennial Centaurs scored over those two years in the double digits.

You didn’t even need any of your two hands to count how many wins they had. A two-year long losing skid was compounded by the fact that Centennial’s program wasn’t even close to moving in a forward direction, which had it pegged as the laughing stock of the provincial football pundits and the student body through the first few years of the 2000s.

In 2004, with a new coaching staff came a new attitude.

Suddenly there was a commitment to bettering a football program that hadn’t made it to the Triple A provincial title game since 1990 and hadn’t won the big game since the school opened in the fall of 1966.

On Saturday night, before a lively crowd bundled up in the chilling grand stands of Langley’s McLeod Athletic Park, the Centaurs finally made it back to the top of the mountain.

It took 43 years. That’s almost as bad as the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Vancouver Canucks aren’t that far behind.

But under the guidance of head coach Kevin Phillips, the Centaurs raised the championship banner and trophy to cap of a rebuilding process that was desperately needed.

“With me not being a teacher and being the head of this football program, [the school] put their support behind for the last seven years and hopefully this is a repayment in some sort of way,” Phillips said as Centennial fans cheered the champs off the field.

“These football programs are expensive and they take a lot of work but they’ve supported us all the way through.”

The support has paid off with a championship, but there has been a huge change in the attitude that has turned from one where students wanted to play football simply for the notoriety of wearing the jersey and looking cool.

Now there is a winning attitude, and this was displayed by the performance of the Centaurs offensive line that dominated the line of scrimmage and allowed big gains by Nehemie Kankolongo and quarterback Lemar Durant.

Phillips said that the hoggies up front benefited from the services of offensive line coach Ryk Piche, who concluded his first year on the sidelines for Centennial on Saturday evening.

“We saw it early on again [Saturday night] that really we weren’t going to be denied in that area of the game,” said Phillips.

“Our O-line coach, he came in and started working with the linemen in the weight room very early, flipping tires, doing other stuff to get them ready to get out here and dominate and here’s what you see.”

Now the trick is to keep this wave rolling.

For the past 15 years, it seems as though certain high schools have had more success at retaining a contender for the Subway Bowl.

Take the W.J. Mouat Hawks, the team Centennial beat 39-36 to win the ‘09 championship, for example. Five championship appearances since 2000 is enough to show the annual success of that program, and Phillips said that he hopes the Centennial program can do the same.

“Dan Doyle told me that what usually happens is programs seem to gain momentum and come to a crescendo and we don’t want this crescendo to end,” Phillips told reporters.

“Hopefully with the success of both programs it will get more kids in our school wanting to play this great game and we can continue to make these types of runs.

“It’s been a 43-year drought for Centennial so this is an amazing, amazing time for us.”

The aforementioned Doyle was Centennial’s first coach that took the team to the promise land in ‘66.

What is promising for the Coquitlam high school is that the Junior Varsity Triple A Centaurs also won their respective championship on Friday.

In 2007, they lost the big game to Terry Fox in overtime with many of the players from that team moving on to the Varsity team that won the Triple A championship.

The program has gotten back to developing players at a young age at the junior level and the taste of success in two of the last three years has given those in Grades 9 and 10 motivation to continue those winning ways at the Varsity level.

That certainly bodes well for the future of the Centennial football program.