Head coach Farhan Lalji delivered a cautionary history lesson to his New Westminster Hyacks football squad as they celebrated their third consecutive B.C. high school football road win Saturday afternoon.
The Hyacks had just disposed of the Seaquam Seahawks 28-13 on the North Delta school’s grass field to improve to 5-1 overall and 3-0 in the Western conference. Prior to the game, New West was ranked second in the province and Seaquam fourth. With No. 5 St. Thomas More Knights upsetting top-ranked Terry Fox Ravens of Port Coquitlam 15-8 the night before, the Hyacks will likely assume the No. 1 mantle.
But living in the penthouse at this time of year isn’t a comfortable place to be for the Hyacks head coach.
“(Being ranked No. 1), I said to the players, I’m not thrilled with. We’ve been No. 1 for one week in our program. We were No. 1 for one week in ’09 and lost that first week. It’s just not relevant. As a guy that is involved in rankings in my other life (reporter for the TSN network), believe me it’s as irrelevant as you can find,” said Lalji. “I wanted to address it because I don’t want to talk about it any more. Let’s just go on and worry about playing football. It’s going to put a target on our back, that’s for sure.”
The first team that gets to pull back their bows and aim their arrows at the brand-new bullseye on the Hyacks jerseys is Notre Dame (4-1 overall, 2-1 conference). The Jugglers are led by provincial coaching legend Denis Kelly, the brains behind a perennial powerhouse program at W.J. Mouat in Abbotsford.
“They’ve got a lot of athletes across the board. They’ve got really good receivers, and at running back. Their line is no joke. And then there’s the Denis Kelly factor because he’s always going to have them well prepared,” said Lalji, who has picked Kelly’s exceptional gridiron brain many a time.
The Hyacks, however, get to battle the Vancouver Catholic school on friendly turf. They return to Mercer Stadium on Friday (7:30 p.m.) for the first time since Sept. 8.
Since then they’ve managed to dispose of defending champion Mt. Douglas Rams (29-6) in Victoria, Vancouver College Fighting Irish (20-14) and Seaquam. Three of their final four regular season games will be at home.
“I’ve said from the start that our conference is just a beast that it’s hard to look ahead. Even after (Notre Dame), the Belmonts (Oct. 20, 5 p.m.) and Carson Grahams (Oct. 27, 3:30 p.m. in North Vancouver) are capable of winning. I know it’s cliche, but it really is just focus on the next thing,” said Lalji.
At Seaquam, the Sea-hawks had a 13-12 lead at the half with quarterback Josh Haydu throwing a touchdown toss to receiver Tyson Philpot while running back, and Tyson’s twin, Jalen Philpot scored a rushing TD. But the Hyacks had plenty of weapons of their own. The biggest one they brought out of their cache Saturday hadn’t been used extensively this season. Running back Sammy Sidhu scored all four New West touchdowns, including the clinching score on a 74-yard romp in the closing minutes. His 37-yard TD run started the scoring for the Hyacks and he followed with two touchdown plunges, one in the first half and the other early in the fourth quarter. In total, Sidhu rushed for 187 yards.
“Our offence kind of changed because we had some new athletes like (wide receiver) Sebastian Reid. We’re more of a balanced offence now. It takes some time getting adjusted, but we’re getting our running game going now and it should be good,” said Sidhu.
Despite being on a three-game win streak, Lalji hadn’t been impressed with the Hyacks offence. He was Saturday.
“It’s been a while since we established our (run) identity. We’ve tried so hard to get Sebastian involved and there were plays there for him to make, but we were just determined we had to get back to our identity. He’s going to get his. He’s a heck of a player, and we’re going to use him more because we have to. It was a real goal of ours to get back to our identity and get our run game going again, and play the way we need to play the whole game,” said Lalji.
Although Haydu connected on 19 of 31 passes for 271 yards, with Tyson Philpot catching seven for 137 yards, and Jalen Philpot ran for more than 100 yards, Lalji praised the Hyacks’ play on both sides of the ball in the second half. He told them in the post-game huddle, “That’s what it’s going to take to win a championship.”
“We played a quality team,” said Lalji. “Not that the others haven’t been, but (Seaquam) had the athletes to match us across the board. Watching them today, they’re about a lot more than just (numbers) five and six, the two Philpots, but they have other speed players on the edge, physical players up front. It was a quality win against a good team.
“The biggest thing for us is the second half. The first half felt like the same old, same old. We kind of shot ourselves in the foot, couldn’t make plays again. We really stuck together. We talked a lot about trying to build team. That’s been a bit of a concern in previous weeks, but nobody got down on each other. We stayed the course, and we were able to fight through it. If the approach to the mistakes had been like it had been the last couple of weeks, we might not have found a way to win this game. But they stuck together. Our defence has been awesome all year, and they pitched a shutout the second half. Every time Seaquam was able to get into the red zone we were able to make plays and get out of it.”
The Hyack junior varsity remained unbeaten with a 34-22 win against the Roadrunners in Mission last Thursday. Taran Birdi scored a touchdown hat trick of sorts. He got one on a pass from QB Payton Myers, a second on a punt return and a third on an interception return. Running back Dominic Racher and tight end Matthew Drake got the other TDs for New West.
