Taking it to the corner, part 4: We Beat Quinte!

My Disney sports moment

Photo by Ambreen Hasan on Unsplash

The keeper was playing with a dog. Like, during the game. The referee probably should have done something about that— better yet, the kid’s coach. It was more than a tad disrespectful to the team he was playing.

This dick was loudly and obviously playing with a dog on the pitch. If we could have gotten the damn ball, we might have shoved it up his…

This is one of my most lasting memories of my time playing soccer as a teen. It was a Quinte-Prince Edwards Secondary School League match sometime in the fall of 1988. We (the Centre Hastings Secondary School Centurions) were in Belleville to take on the Quinte (pronounced Quinn-tee, in case you were wondering) Secondary School Blue Devils. It was the first game of the season, so it was the first game any of the Centurions (with the exception of our overworked keeper, Kevin) had played since the previous fall, when we had wrapped up a 2 win season in second last place, having only beaten the other rural team — North Hastings — twice.

We were losing the game by about 6 goals at the time of the dog incident. It would end up being 8-0. Eight is a traumatic number for me when it comes to soccer.

So, not a great start to the season. The only season us hicks got. It’s not like the Belleville boys were in professional academies, but they at least played in summer leagues and were getting of a semblance of coaching. In Belleville, that usually meant either old Greek or British men that didn’t have coaching badges so much as they had strong opinions about Olympiacos or Liverpool.

But us rural kids? We got high school soccer and, in our case, Mr. Harrop, who was a brilliant and passionate English Lit teacher who was absolutely instrumental in my love of…reading and writing. On the football front, he had the right accent and knew the offside rule. Most importantly he was willing to take on the job. In the late 80s, that was the best you could hope for. Nothing but respect for Mr. Harrop here.

Overall, though, CHSS didn’t put a lot of thought into the soccer program. It was something for the awkward kids to play while the real athletes took to the football field, where we did have top notch coaching — a former CFL player, in fact — new equipment and the best field time. They also won a lot. They captured the Central Ontario championship in my Grade 12 year, the furthest that it was possible for a high school football team to go back in the 1980s.

So, that was where soccer was then — an afterthought, with the traditional sports getting all the money, coaching and attention. Even in my own case, I was mostly focused on the start of my next hockey season in the fall. Soccer was the fun thing I did that kept me connected to my heritage. At least that was the case up until the dog incident.

There was something bonding about getting our ass handed to us while their keeper was playing with a dog. It made us practice a little bit harder and want to be better. Us soccer nerds started to hang out more. And since soccer was a bonding factor, we started to learn more about the game. Basic tactics (lets not get crazy here we weren’t exactly working triangles, but understanding what a fullback is supposed to do in a standard 4-4-2 set-up? Yeah, we taught ourselves that).

All of this meant that we got better. A little bit better. This isn’t a Disney Movie so let’s not get carried away, but we got a few results over the next few years. Draws against teams that had previously beaten us easily, a few wins against teams that we had only lost narrowly to before and…

WE BEAT THE ****ERS!

Yeah, when Quinte came north to the farmer’s field we called a home pitch for the final game of that 1988 season we played the game of our lives. Maybe it was a Disney movie!

We set-up with 5 at the back, man-marked their best player, and defended our hearts out for 75 minutes (high school games were two 40 min halves) until a long hopeful ball found our fast but erratic forward who made the best strike of his life to beat Mr. Dog Player to the far corner and a 1-0 lead. The last 5 minutes was a blur, but I can still see the rush to mob our keeper (who made about 10 saves, it should be noted) at the final whistle.

We! Beat! Quinte!

If you were to find my Grade 13 high school yearbook you’d see my “highlight of my time at CHSS” was “we beat Quinte.” About 4 other players on that team had the same note. It’s probably my favourite memory of any sporting activity I’ve ever been involved in and I’m a fairly successful Masters runner now, even having won a medal at the National 5k Masters Championships last year (he humbly adds). There is just something special about the stuff that happens when you are young and finding yourself.

What I love about this story is how perfectly it encapsulates what soccer was in the late 80s and into the 90s in Canada. It was about a few of us that were passionate about the sport fighting to have little moments to hold onto. We were mostly ignored and often scorned, but we never gave up.

We found each other and we kept pushing. I’m going to get into the 1990 to 2007 era in the next couple parts of this series, which will really illustrate how important the personal connections would be. It was slightly easier then as the internet was opening our eyes to how many of us were out there. We were spread thin, but we weren’t alone.

That was a few years away, though, that fall day in Madoc, Ontario, when a bunch of kids who were falling in love with the game pulled off the upset of their young lives.

The day they beat Quinte.