Kodiaks futsal prepared for Championships weekend

By Lethbridge Herald on March 9, 2023.

By Justin Seward

Lethbridge Herald

The Lethbridge College Kodiaks  men’s and women’s futsal teams have one goal in mine this weekend at the Alberta Colleges Athletic Conference Futsal Championships, and that is bringing home the banners from Keyano College in Fort McMurray

“I’m pretty excited for them,” said head coach Sean Carey.

“I think we’ve got a real good chance here to make a lot of noise, and if they both play to their full potential, there’s no reason why we won’t be bringing home a banner and definitely some hardware. So they’ve got to do what they need to do and then yeah like I said we should be in good shape. I think the favourites for the weekend being SAIT, you know we (men’s team)took them to a tie in the qualifying, so we’re right there with them.”

The men’s team were the only club not to lose to SAIT in the regional tournament qualifier.

“That gave the boys a lot of confidence coming into this weekend, and they know what it takes and they’re going to have to play lights out,” said Carey.

“But I’ve no problems that they’re going to do that and I think we’ll be just fine if we go into the games confident.”

It was between the qualifier and this weekend’s championships that Carey wanted to fine tune the men’s  attention to detail on the defensive side of the ball.

“I think sometimes we get a little I wouldn’t call it … aggressive, but we like to commit guys forward, we want to score goals, and sometimes we also just have to take a look behind us and make sure that we’re not sacrificing our own end to do that,” said Carey.

Carey thinks it’s going to be a matter of scoring goals for the women’s team.

“We don’t score enough goals,” said Carey.

“So we need to find the back of the net more often because we lost to SAIT 3-1 (in qualifiers) and if you concede three goals in futsal …  (and)anytime you score one in this game, you’re not going to win very many. So that’s the key for them, finding the back of the net.”

Carey thinks every team is confident at the tournament.

“I think everybody thinks that they can win,” he said.

“You know, there’s some quality players up here, there’s some quality teams. You know, we’re going up against a guy (SAIT’s Nico Gonzales) that used to play for Canada at futsal. So that’s something that the boys like to take the challenge into. And I think like I said, everybody’s coming in here this weekend thinking that they’re going to take away the banner.”

The men open up against host Keyano at 4:45 p.m. and the women have the same opponent at 2:15 p.m. today.

 Both teams play SAIT on Saturday, with the women at 10:15 a.m. and the men’s game at 12:45 p.m. to conclude round-robin play.