With the hard work and effort our players put into a challenging week of training camp we most definitely expected more yesterday afternoon at Varsity Centre. It was easy to see not one person in film session today felt good about themselves and no one was satisfied with our performance. Yes, there were some good things that we can take away from the game but no matter how you look at it, a loss is a loss.

I can honestly say in all my years of sports that losing is one thing that eats away at you. Maybe it’s the competitive nature built into all high performance athletes but it’s hard to feel good about yourself after a loss, no matter how you performed individually. Some people can look at the fact that McGill is an older team than us and their first year players aren’t exactly true freshman like ours OR you could even look at the fact that they had an extra week of training camp.

Those are all excuses: things that we wouldn’t have to worry about had we won the game and played the way us and our coaches know we can.

I don’t think it’s so much the loss that bothers our players and our coaching staff; I think it’s how we lost. It is more the fact that we beat ourselves as much as McGill beat us. As long as you come out of a game saying you did everything you could have, left it all out on the field and played ‘balls out’, then you feel much better about yourself. Sometimes that team is just better prepared or may have outplayed you that particular day. Yesterday doesn’t really fall into that category; our team shot ourselves in the foot.

We have an excellent coaching staff, some freak athletes, very strong veteran leadership and an absolutely phenomenal recruiting class - big up to Alex P and Aaron Milton who got their first CIS touchdowns in their starting debuts yesterday and to Kyle Kennedy – the runner-up for special teams player of the week.

However, yesterday we simply didn’t capitalize on the chances we had to take over the game. McGill is a strong team, put together some great drives on us and got key stops when they needed them. However, in order for us to be a competitive team this season - at some point we need to start capitalizing on the opportunities we have to take over games.

Coach talks a lot about finishing. We here it all the time on the field and that’s one thing we didn’t do yesterday. To be blunt – our team didn’t finish.

We had chances to kick McGill when they were down and we didn’t, we let them take over the game and they took advantage of our mistakes, our penalties and our mental errors. I think everyone watching film Sunday saw that we could have put together a much more polished game and the final score could have been much different.

The reality is we didn’t and it wasn’t, in order to improve from this loss we need, as a team, to realize that Wednesday against Guelph we need to finish! We need to capitalize on the opportunities we have to take over games and not make the same mistakes that were made on the field yesterday.

Our team has to take this season one game at a time and leave behind and improve on any mistakes that were made in the previous game, starting with yesterday’s pre-season game.

Maybe this ‘scribe’ didn’t offer a summary of the game as some people may have expected, but I think it definitely gives you an insight to where our players are mentally right now. We will have a lot of fire going into our game against Guelph this Wednesday as we have a chance to re-write history and start this season off on a good note.

This year our players have a chance to really be a part of something. We have a lot to prove and we need to play in that manner. We will have a great two days of practice and make sure we are fully prepared for whatever Guelph has to offer. Let’s get it done this week fellas!

Seb.