The Nanaimo Timbermen juniors will take their first whack at the regular season.
The city’s B.C. Junior A Lacrosse League club starts the regular season this Saturday (April 26) with a road game against the Delta Islanders.
The schedule is challenging, said Ken Morrison, the team’s new head coach. With Delta this week and the New Westminster Salmonbellies and the Coquitlam Adanacs next weekend, Nanaimo is facing three of the league’s favoured teams.
Any success against that sort of opposition would not only help in the standings, but would also help a T-men team that doesn’t really know how to win.
“I don’t think they do yet, that’s the biggest thing,” Morrison said. “For the last two years it’s been tough on them. What I was able to tell these kids is, we’re going to get better.”
Something that Nanaimo’s junior team has learned over the years is that the season is too short to have a slow start. The T-men think they have a good team this year; not only do they plan to win games, they want to win right away.
“It’s so important. We need to get rolling,” said Brett Fleming, T-men veteran. “We’ve started 0-5 or whatever both years I’ve played. It would be huge if we could start the year out with a couple wins. I think you’d get the fans on board a lot more and it would help everybody.”
GAME ON … The home opener for the junior A Timbermen is May 3, when the Salmonbellies visit Frank Crane Arena for a 5 p.m. faceoff … To read last week's article on the junior A Timbermen, please click here.
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