"WE EAT, SLEEP, AND BREATHE FOOTBALL"

Transcona Nationals Program Embodies the Growth of Football in Manitoba.

Scott Taylor
July 2008

Ed Kulyk (centre), coach of the defensive backs and linebackers, provides instruction to Brendan Klassen (far left) and teammates.

Brendan Klassen likes to play football. He’s 11 and he plays linebacker for the Transcona Nationals peewee team.

“I like the tackling,” Brendan says.

“He’s a linebacker,” says his dad, Nationals director of football operations, Darrell Klassen, “No mental stability.”

Darrell laughed. He knows more than anyone else that son Brendan is the apple that didn’t fall far from the tree. In the Klassen household, football is almost religion and the Nationals clubhouse is the family’s place of worship.

“We live this club,” Klassen says of his family and his good friends Steve and Laurie Hoel. “We all have jobs and yet, when the season’s around the corner, we start spending 50-60 hours a week here.

“Amateur football programs can’t exist without the volunteers. The coaching staff, the training staff, the board, everybody here is a volunteer. But it’s working.

“Steve is the head coach of our peewee program and he’s looking at 11-12 coaches on his staff. An amateur football operation couldn’t pay for that. Without volunteers, there is no football. And yet, with the volunteers we have, football is exploding in Manitoba.”

Running back Adam Gottfried gets set in the backfield.

Evidently, there are a lot more kids like Brendan Klassen. In fact, Brendan’s good friend, Brandon (Mouse) Hoel, is a 4-foot-1, 130-pound offensive lineman with the Nationals peewees. He’s 11 and he’s played organized football since he was a seven-year-old in the “terminator” age group. Brendan and Mouse’s teammate, runningback Adam Gottfried, is 80-pounds soaking wet. He sees himself as Transcona’s answer to Charles Roberts.

“When the snow melts, we eat, sleep and breathe football,” says Adam’s dad Matt. “It’s all about football and for guys like Steve and Darrell, who put in so much time, it’s hard to believe they actually have jobs.”

Well, in fact, they do. Steve does airfield maintenance for the Winnipeg Airports Authority, Darrell is a project manager for Tri Star Technical, a communications installer. But that’s just what they do for money. The Transcona Nationals is what they do for love.

While most Manitobans know of the St. Vital Mustangs and Fort Garry Lions programs and football fans in these parts have certainly heard of the historical importance of amateur programs such as the Winnipeg Rods, the East Side Eagles, the Winnipeg Nomads and the Winnipeg Hawkeyes, the Transcona Nationals have been turning out football players since 1912.

The Nationals program we know today was officially born on March 25, 1958, when the Transcona Nationals Football Club elected its first board of directors. Later in 1958 the Greater Winnipeg Midget Football League began and the Transcona Stadium Commission granted permission to the Nationals to play at the Stadium field.

Today, the Nationals field teams in seven divisions – the Terminators (ages 7-8), the Atoms (9-10), the Peewees (11-12), the Minor Bantams (13), the Bantams (14), the Midgets (15-17), and the Majors (18-21). The Nationals also have three cheerleading squads that cheer-on the teams during the season and then travel to competitions in the off-season.

As well, the Nationals flag football program is growing faster than the volunteers can keep up.

“Four years ago, when this flag football program started in Winnipeg, there were about 50 kids” said Steve Hoel, “This year, we’ll have 1,400 kids. It’s a program carried out in conjunction with the CFL-NFL partnership and it’s growing into one of the biggest leagues in the city.”

One person who knows about growth is Steve’s wife Laurie. She says “football is in my blood,” and this love affair started while she was growing up in Dryden, Ont.. Her father was a Bomber season ticket holder and every other weekend they’d drive into Winnipeg to watch their favourite CFL team.

Steve Hoel serves as head coach of the peewee program, and wife Laurie is now president of the MB Minor Football Association.

This year, Laurie Hoel takes over as the president of the Manitoba Minor Football Association.

“I’ve just always loved football,” she said. “Then my sons started playing (her 15-year-old son James Seeley, from a previous marriage, plays for the Transcona Nationals midgets) and I just started out as a mom on the sidelines. Then I became the manager and then I started coaching. I took all the coaching clinics and now I’m as assistant coach and manager of the peewees.

“Don’t forget, this isn’t just a boys sport. We have half a dozen or so girls playing in the Nationals program. Last year, we had a girl on the nine-year-old Atom team named Ashley Williams who was just a great O-lineman, er, ahh, O-lineperson, I guess.”

Laurie takes over the MMFA at a time of tremendous growth. In 1997, the MMFA had 23 teams and barely 500 players. This year, it will boast 100 teams and nearly 2,800 players. The 2008 season begins on Aug. 9 and there are barely enough fields to handle all the games.

It’s quite interesting to recall that back when David Asper started his campaign to build a new stadium and take over ownership of the Bombers, he said he wanted to turn Manitoba football into Texas football. He wanted Manitoba to become the hotbed of football in Canada, much like Texas is the hotbed of football in the United States.

That might already be happening. Especially in Transcona.

“More and more kids are falling in love with the game,” said Darrell Klassen. “A lot of kids are transitioning from soccer. Football is not as big as hockey yet, but I can see the potential. We have grown so fast and we have so many kids who just love playing, that I can see it as one day, being as big as hockey.”

And that’s just as much a tribute to the volunteers who make playing football such a wonderful experience, as it is to the kids who have fallen madly in love with the game.