The Handsworth Royals senior football team was supposed to be getting a lesson in the sport at its best today, watching the reigning Super Bowl champion Seattle Seahawks battle the San Diego Chargers at Qualcomm Stadium.
Instead they're stuck at home getting a lesson in reality, their trip cancelled due to the ongoing dispute between the B.C. Teachers' Federation and the provincial government. The Royals had been planning the trip to San Diego since December and had come up with an itinerary that would have also included college campus tours, a visit to the USS Midway - an aircraft carrier turned floating museum - and a game against a local high school team, among other fun things.
"Right now we would have been on the way to Disneyland," said longtime Royals head coach Jay Prepchuk Friday morning, adding that with the teachers' strike in full effect there was no way the trip could happen. "We just felt that the timing of it, with everything, was just so bad that we just decided to cancel it."
Prepchuk said the team was able to recover much of the money already spent on the trip, but that's little solace for the players.
"They're pretty disappointed," he said. "It's just such a great bonding experience for the kids."
The Royals also missed out on the Buchanan Bowl, the annual grudge match against Carson Graham that was supposed to be played Sept. 6 but was postponed.
"(San Diego) and the Buchanan Bowl was a real double whammy," said Prepchuk. "Every year that's one of the big highlight games of the year, to play the Buchanan Bowl. The kids talk about it all year long and look forward to the game all year long. It's just so disappointing for them to miss that game. Hopefully we'll be able to still play it."
Handsworth's heartbreaks are just a small snippet of the missed opportunities piling up throughout the school system as the dispute stretches into the fall sports season. Last week BC School Sports, the organization that oversees interschool competition and provincial championships, released a statement saying it will proceed with the planned fall championship schedule for football, volleyball, boys soccer, field hockey, aquatics and cross country for teams and athletes that have received permission from their schools and districts to participate.
Here on the North Shore, however, there will not likely be any official high school leagues in action as long as the strike is on, said Gerry Karvelis, co-ordinator of the North Shore Secondary Schools' Athletics Association.
"The NSSSAA's leagues are co-ordinated, chaired, supervised, coached, and governed primarily by teachers," he told the North Shore News, adding that associations around the Lower Mainland are in similar situations. "Because teachers play such a vital role in the operations of the NSSSAA, it is not possible to run our leagues at this time."
If there is a resolution to the dispute the NSSSAA would hope to get the leagues up and running as quickly as possible to at least get in a compressed schedule before the provincial championships start.
"The plan is that we'll do whatever we can in a short season to complete leagues, prioritizing the seniors first since they have deadlines for provincials," said Karvelis, who is himself on strike as a member of the BCTF.
The dispute isn't only affecting public schools. The halls of St. Thomas Aquinas, an independent Catholic school, are bustling and sports tryouts for the fall season are almost wrapped up, but the teams are worried they won't have anybody to play against.
"Our boys are kind of chomping at the bit here," said Loui Salituro, coach of the STA senior boys soccer team that is ready to defend the AA provincial title they won last season. "We have a core of the team back from last year and there's a lot of motivation to kind of get back at it and have teams gunning for us and trying to defend that title.. .. They've been asking me about the season and that kind of thing. There's a lot of excitement in terms of anticipation - they want to get this ball rolling."
Salituro, who is STA's athletic director, said the school's teams will do what they can to get in exhibition games while also battling as usual in the Catholic school provincial championships that are held every year before the BCSS championships. There is also an independent league on the Lower Mainland, but Salituro said they have no intention of joining.
"We're loyal to our North Shore association so we're just going to stick it out here and when they get things resolved then we'll resume from there."
If things drag on through championship season, however, it could be a bit of a lost year even for teams that are on the field.
"We may qualify (for provincials) with limited competition, which would be kind of sad in a way," said Salituro. "It's kind of an odd start to the school year for us here.... It's a lot better when we have all the schools involved. It just makes it much more exciting. It's kind of dull, in a way."
The season may be dull yet less complicated for independents like STA, Bodwell, Collingwood and Mulgrave, but the situation in the public schools is much murkier. Some teams are practising with community coaches at the helm while others are shut down completely. North Shore football teams are governed by BC High School Football, not the NSSSAA, and there are games being scheduled for teams that are up and running. On the North Shore Handsworth, Argyle, Sentinel and West Van are running with community coaches while the Windsor and Carson programs are shut down.
Prepchuk, who is a BCTF member and has taken his turns on the picket lines, said he's been around the Handsworth football team at times but non-teachers have taken full control of the coaching.
"I'm in full support of the BCTF and where we're at," he said. "I've been fortunate enough to have people that can run the program without me being involved. I'm a teacher first and it's important that I support the BCTF."
It's still tough, however, for all of the coaches who are watching football season begin knowing that they'll be on the outside looking in until the dispute is over, said Prepchuk.
"It's a disappointing situation for everybody involved," he said. "It's so tough. It's such a big part of our lives. We love it, we have a passion for it. For so many of us it's just a huge, huge part of our lives coaching football.... It's a 12-month out of the year thing with all our fundraising and dealing with off-season training, all that stuff. It's just difficult."
