It was a stellar year for the St. Paul Bengals and no less stellar a year for the team’s first-time head coach, Seth Henderson, who worked his boys hard and all the way up the ranks to championship wins and provincial finals.
“I took over as a Bengals head coach at the start of this (football) year. And I guess we did pretty good,” he says modestly of a year that saw the junior high boys capture the northern Alberta Tier III championship and the Wheatland Bantam Football League title and then head to Calgary for provincial finals, where they finished second to the Calgary Colts. That record helped make Henderson a lock for Football Alberta’s Novice Coach of the Year award, an award he will accept at a luncheon in Calgary on March 12.
“I guess it’s a pretty big deal. I’m still in shock,” he said of the recognition. The news came as a pleasant, if unexpected, surprise, with Henderson saying, “It was definitely unexpected. I kind of didn’t think I deserved it.”
Henderson had served one year as assistant coach for the St. Paul Lions team before taking on the reins of the bantam team as head coach this past season. The team had a rocky start, with the Bengals losing each of its preseason games.
“We had a couple of players that were extremely angry,” he said, adding that some were frustrated and didn’t confidence in him as a head coach. But he thinks it worked out to the team’s advantage in not making them overconfident. “Losing in the pre-season helped make us a better team . . . it made us hungrier.
“Once we got our first win in the regular season, it was like a ferocious lion after a wildebeest. We just wanted more and more.”
Henderson felt the third game of the season, which saw the Bengals best the Mustangs out of Lloydminster, seemed to be a turning point in giving the kids confidence in him as a coach. “Once I had the confidence, I could instill anything I wanted,” he said.
But there were several factors that went into gaining the confidence and making the team a winning one, he said, starting with having players that had “the work ethic, the determination and the willingness to learn.” The great work of assistant coaches Derek Zapasocki and David Burton, and head co-coach Steve Johnson were secondary factors, while the third point in the Bengals’ favour was having solid volunteer help from parents and football-loving members of St. Paul’s community, he said.
The team also added two more practices to the weekly schedule, so kids played football six days a week, leading to physical and mental improvement, said Henderson. “I think those extra two days a week really improved the skill set of our kids and ultimately their football knowledge. They got stronger on the field, they got more confident in their abilities and that led to confidence in victories.”
He agrees this involved a big commitment to coaching, but hard work is part of his life philosophy.
“In my opinion, you can’t do anything half-assed. If you want to be a really good coach and if you want to be a good mentor to the kids, you have to portray yourself as being willing to take everything to the limit.”
Todd Tanasichuk, head coach for the St. Paul Lions, nominated Henderson for the award, a nomination supported by the league. “He’s done a great job – I was hoping he would be recognized and he has,” Tanasichuk said. He noted that this past year marked the first time in the St. Paul Football Club’s 26-odd years of existence for a team to make it to the provincial finals. “For a first year guy to have as much success as he did, obviously it’s a feather in his cap.”
