Comets experiencing life lessons early in season

By Lethbridge Herald on April 30, 2024.

By Justin Seward

Lethbridge Herald

Raymond Comets varsity girls rugby head coach, Dan Bikman’s, focus every year is to help the kids experience life lessons in sport and that is no different this spring.

“We teach them to work, we teach them to work together as a team, we teach them to kind of deal with adversity in the right way,” said Bikman.

“When we loss to LCI, I told them you go and shake those kids’ hands, they beat you and they deserve a respectable and sportsmanlike good game and that’s what they did deserve because they outplayed us. The overarching vision I have as a coach is to teach kids about life through sport.”

Bikman said you learn about yourself and how you respond to adversity in a very microscopic way.

“It builds character and exposes character,” he said.

The loss that Bikman eluded to was the 20-5 home loss to LCI earlier this season.

“I mean that’s the benefit of a loss, you learn a ton,” said Bikman.

“LCI essentially beat us in every category of play. So we learned  we need to show up, do some work that we’re not used to doing, we need to be more organized on our offensive attack. They exploited numerous weaknesses in our attack and then in our defence. They’re a great team, they have a good core of athletes and then one really fast kid that took advantage of some sleepy defence. You name a lesson you can learn in sport and we learned it.”

A lot of these kids have only ever lost one game prior to this recent one.

“The tough thing about a program like ours is I had kids who had only ever lost one game in three years,” said Bikman.

“Our 15s lost in the provincial final last year and they hadn’t lost any other games. They didn’t even know what it was like. So you’re talking about kids who are three years into a sport and they’ve lost one game.”

Bikman likes what he is seeing so far this season.

“We’re blending a lot of new players, [as] we lost a lot of seniors from last year,” said Bikman.

“I’ve seen them come a long way in the last two weeks.”

The Comets will lean on the likes of Mia Wilde, Lucy Mohr, Summer Long and Livy Hasagawa.

“They’re good athletes and they do the blue-collar work and the while-collar work,” said Bikman.

The Comets will look to defend their 7s provincial title while hoping to upgrade to a 15s gold medal this season.