In front of a record crowd for a professional soccer game in Montreal – announced to be 58,912 – the Impact pulled off a 1-1 draw with the visiting Chicago Fire. The Impact were playing at the Olympic Stadium as a result of construction delays to their future home – Stade Saputo – which will not be completed until mid-June. The cavernous Olympic Stadium, initially built to house the now defunct Montreal Expos, is certainly not the best soccer venue. The fans are far away from the pitch, the vast roof dampens the atmosphere, and the playing surface itself is far from ideal. There were also concerns that the stadium issues would lower attendance to the game. The team itself also met scrutiny, as it was considered by many to not have enough offensive capability to compete in the league. However, none of these factors seemed to matter when the fans nearly blew off the roof after captain Davy Arnaud scored the club’s first goal in MLS history.

As fans of any expansion franchise in MLS will say, that first goal is a special moment. Toronto had to wait until their fifth franchise game to score, whereas Vancouver’s came in the first fifteen minutes. In both cases, though, the scorers of these goals have gone down in club history. Davy Arnaud’s name will now play a similarly important role in the Montreal Impact’s history.

The goal itself was fairly impressive, and managed to dissuade some of the early concerns that the team has no firepower. After fifty-five minutes of frustration for the Impact, Gambian-born winger Sanna Nyassi played in a ball from the right hand side, which was met by the head of Arnaud as he guided it into the far corner of the net, past the outstretched arms of Chicago keeper. In that moment – and the pandemonium that followed – the worries leading up to the game and season seemed to be thrown aside.

Arnaud immediately started sprinting toward the Impact supporters. Before he could reach the stands, he was mobbed by a group of equally excited teammates, delighted at the breakthrough.

Supporters – who had, in some cases, waited years for this moment–were exchanging hugs, jumping around without abandon and grinning giddily. The scene was absolutely infectious, especially amongst the supporters of the Montreal Ultras, an official group of intense soccer fans. They even set off fire works and flares in the crowd with delirious excitement.

The concern that the location of Olympic Stadium would take away from the atmosphere was certainly gone, as the fans energized the stadium in a way that had not been done in recent memory. The worry of poor ticket sales was answered earlier by the announced attendance of nearly 60,000. This first goal may also spur a good number of them to show up again and again as the season progresses. Most important was the mere fact that the Impact managed to score a goal, despite the critiques of the team that head coach Jesse Marsch had assembled.

The fairytale story was cut short by Chicago’s response in the 71st minute. Although Montreal came close to scoring several times in the last ten minutes, they were forced to settle for the 1-1 final. At the end of the match the supporters greeted the draw as a moral victory, giving their players a standing ovation upon the final whistle.

As the Impact’s season continues they will still have to deal with the stadium problems and with competing week to week in the MLS. However, they will be able to tackle them with the encouragement of one absolutely incredible moment that will forever have a place in Montreal Impact folklore.

Sam Gregory is U0 Arts student. He hopes the Blue Jays can return to their early nineties glory. He can be reached at sportseh@mcgilldaily.com.

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Fantuz was given the CFL’s “Outstanding Canadian of the Year Award” for 2010, and his stellar play earned him a contract with the NFL’s Chicago Bears in that off-season. Less than a year later, he returned to Saskatchewan, failing to make a single appearance for the Bears. Now that he is back in Canada, he is one of the CFL’s most recognizable names.

The CFL is littered with American athletes who are well known to sports fans across Canada: Anthony Calvillo, Arland Bruce, Jamel Richardson, Henry Burris, and more. Over Fantuz’s six seasons in the CFL, he has managed to join this talented group of players; however, he has the distinction of being the list’s only Canadian. This singularity highlights one of the league’s most prominent criticisms: the lack of star Canadian players.

In Canada, the CFL has to compete with the NFL – a league with such a lucrative TV deal that its’ exposure in Canada far outweighs that of the CFL. In order to compete with the NFL, the CFL needs to offer something different and distinctly Canadian with which people can connect – having a different set of rules than the NFL does not create enough interest. This is why a player like Andy Fantuz is so important to the future of the league.

Fantuz’s story started the same way as thousands of other Canadian football players’ do. He played high school and university football at Canadian schools. He began to show his exceptionalism, though, while at UWO, winning the Hec Crighton Award in 2005 as the best university football player in Canada.

Despite the prestige of the Hec Crighton award, the CFL isn’t littered with past recipients. The simple reason is that – in order to win the award – a player must be playing in a noticeable position; it usually goes to either a quarterback, running back, or receiver. CFL teams tend to fill these positions with Americans coming from American colleges. Other than Fantuz, the most successful recent recipient of the award has been running back Jesse Lumsden – the 2004 winner – whose success has come as an international bobsledder and not as a player in the CFL.

Fantuz’s move away from Saskatchewan to Hamilton sees him going to the much larger sports media market of Southeastern Ontario. However, the CFL is not as popular in Ontario as it is in Saskatchewan. As one of the most, if not the most recognizable, Canadian player in the CFL, he will have an important role in furthering interest among CFL organizations to give Canadian football players a little more leeway. Hopefully, his continued success and the introduction of more Canadian star players will give the CFL a more distinctly Canadian identity and help the league compete with the NFL in Canada.

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On January 30, the Toronto Blue Jays held their annual State of the Franchise evening where the club took questions from approximately 1,000 season ticket holders in attendance. According to the Blue Jays’ official invitation, the State of the Franchise is an evening for fans of the team to have their voices heard by John Beeston, Alex Anthopoulos, and John Farrell, the team’s president, general manager, and bench coach respectively. However, in reality, the State of the Franchise is usually more of a chance for fans to complain about trivial issues like ticket prices and paraphernalia availability.

This year, however, Anthopoulos was the first to say, “it’s just a bit more exciting this year.” Intermitted amongst the talk of hot dog prices, and where one can buy a baby-sized Blue Jays jersey, there was serious talk about what fans want most: the playoffs.

What has the management and fans most hopeful is the talented roster that only showed glimpses of their full potential last season. The Blue Jays have one of the best sluggers in MLB with Jose Bautista, who racked up 43 home runs last season. Ricky Romero, who barring injury will be the Blue Jays’ opening-day pitcher, won 15 out of his 26 games last season. They are hoping that, with a little bit more support from their batters, Romero will easily reach the twenty win milestone this season. Brandon Morrow, Brett Cecil, Henderson Alvarez, and Dustin McGowan will likely make up the rest of a starting pitching rotation that is already the envy of many teams on comparable payrolls to the Blue Jays. 22-year-old Canadian third baseman, Brett Lawrie, is another player to watch as he stormed onto the major league scene last season batting getting a hit on 29 per cent of his plate appearances.

The Blue Jays’ roster has a solid mix of youth and experience going into Spring Training next month. Another advantage for the team as they prepare for training camp is that their roster is a healthy one. In the past, the Blue Jays’ pitching staff in particular has been plagued with long term injuries, whereas this year the starting rotation is healthy heading Spring Training.

All in all, there are a lot of positives for the Toronto Blue Jays going into the 2012 season, and Beeston acknowledged these positives, asserting that in the next five years he expects to see the Blue Jays in the playoffs two or three times. Whether or not these promises will come to fruition, it is hard to deny it is an exciting time to be a Blue Jays fan, especially in comparison to the last 18 seasons of mediocrity.

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With the 2015 Women’s World Cup to be played in Canada, some supporters of the team are starting to get a little nervous. Anything close to a performance like the women had in Germany would be a low point in the program’s history. Canadian supporters saw their nightmares play out before their eyes in 2007, when Canada last hosted a major international event. The Men’s U-20 World Cup was seen as a stepping stone for the Canadian U-20 team that had done reasonably well at the previous two tournaments. When the tournament was at home, the team that had been so hyped up by the Canadian media staged an epic collapse, losing all three games without scoring a single goal. The effects on the U-20 program were devastating – they haven’t qualified for a World Cup since.

The U-20 World Cup in 2007 left a legacy of failure with the Canadian U-20 team. If the women do not fare better in 2015 than they did in 2011, they may be left with a similar legacy. That is why it is absolutely essential that the women’s team does rebound from Germany, and, as has been said before, “redeem themselves”.

While the 2015 World Cup may offer the team a chance at said redemption, the current Olympic Qualifiers and subsequent Olympics are not offering that opportunity. One of the biggest problems this national team has had is that it has been settling for too little. The players, fans, and the last two coaches – Evan Pellarud and Carolina Morace – have celebrated minor achievements as “enough.”

For example, when the women’s team qualified for the quarter-finals, supporters considered them a success even though pre-tournament predictions had Canada as a potential semi-finalist. When Morace took over as head coach in 2009, poor results were glazed over because people believed the team was “playing well” or “playing the right way.” Under the new head coach, John Herdman, this complacency must be seen as unacceptable.

Earlier this month, American forward Abby Wambach told Sportsnet that she thought Canadian Christine Sinclair was “the best all-around player in the world.” If Canada truly does boast the best player in the world, anything but competing with the best teams has to be seen as a failure.

That is why the Olympic Qualifiers are not about redemption; they are about rebuilding a team. The team needs to have a winning mentality because they suffered the worst result of their professional careers only seven months ago.
Luckily for supporters of the team, Herdman seems to be leading the players in a new direction. According to the players in camp, he has been far more open with them than either of the two previous managers and the results have been positive. Central midfielder Kaylyn Kyle spoke with Sportsnet about the changes that have been occurring under Herdman, saying, “John is very direct with you; he tells it like it is. He told me, ‘Look, if you don’t improve this, I can’t see you playing in our midfield.’ It scared the shit out of me. So I watched game tapes and he went over game clips for me. It’s been awesome. I really think I’ll grow under him”.

This type of change is the exact thing Canada needs in order to reach that next level on the international stage. Herdman is a coach who isn’t willing to take minor victories as simply “enough” and is demanding more out of his players than either of the previous two coaches were able – or willing – to do.
It is important to know that what happened in Germany is not thrown aside after the Olympic Qualifiers in Vancouver are over. It doesn’t matter that the media are calling this tournament a shot at redemption. What is important is that the players are aware that the only real redemption can come from a good performance at home in the 2015 World Cup, and that they have a long way to go before that.

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Habitual binge drinking among professional athletes is mostly a thing of the past. In England, some of the most successful soccer players of the 1960s and 1970s had serious drinking problems. Immediately, the name George Best comes to mind. He was the Northern Irish soccer player who was named the best player on the planet in 1967 and famously said, “In 1969, I gave up alcohol – it was the worst twenty minutes of my life.” Best died at age fifty-nine of liver failure. The stories of Best and other soccer players who struggled with alcoholism, have helped to make drinking culture in England – and across the world – a thing of the past.

With the increasingly cut-throat nature of competitive sports, athletes will do anything to get a step up on their opponents. For professional athletes today that means giving up alcohol or, at least, binge drinking. Nowadays there are very few cases of professional athletes with alcohol problems. In university athletics, however, this is an entirely different story.

University athletes are younger than the average professional athlete and their career span is much shorter. For most university athletes, their competitive playing career will end at around 22 or 23, when they finish their undergraduate education. This means they worry less about their long-term future, and their entire focus is on the four years they spend playing at the university level.

However, there are a few university athletes who do want to compete at higher levels like in the Olympics or the Canadian Football League, and the culture of drinking at a university that many of their teammates end up participating in could seriously damage their future aspirations.

The heavy drinking culture associated with university life is often exacerbated at the varsity athletics level. A study conducted by Frank Butts at the University of West Georgia suggests that university athletes on average have 5.07 drinks every weekend, while their none-athletic counterparts have only 3.5 drinks per weekend. These are athletes who train on what is usually a daily basis and require their bodies to be in top physical condition.

The main explanation for the increased alcohol consumption of university athletes can be attributed to post-game celebrations and the sense of camaraderie that comes with being part of a competitive team. Again, for the majority of university athletes, drinking will just be part of their university experience, in the same way being part of a varsity team is. For others, they may be forced to choose between risking their future ambitions or forgoing what seems like a typical university experience.

Five former and current McGill students were represented at the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games, and the Canadian Football League usually recruits a few graduates of the McGill varsity team every year. These athletes are not just competing for four years; they are making their living by competing. The athletes they will be up against that are coming from non-university backgrounds will probably not be training under this same binge-drinking environment that occurs at universities. In order to compete at this same level, these McGill athletes will be either forced to forgo or overcome the heavy drinking culture that comes with university.

Several universities have tried to stop the drinking culture within varsity sports, but reversing a culture is not easy and is potentially more harmful than effective. Queens University forced its baseball team to forfeit its final two games against Wilfrid Laurier University last year after members of the team were drinking on the bus ride home from an away game. The move was met with harsh criticism from both the team and the larger student body. Their argument was that these students are just like any others and should not be under stricter regulations just because they play on a varsity team.

Alcohol has always and will always be a part of university life, and students should have the right to fully experience their time at university regardless of whether or not they represent the school in a varsity sport. However, for the small minority of athletes who will go on to compete at the highest level of competition, this drinking culture has the potential to be a major hurdle in both their personal and professional lives.

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Billy Beane, general manager (GM) of the Oakland A’s, demonstrated how misused and, at times, ignored statistics were in Major League Baseball. He revolutionized the game by using new forms of statistics to evaluate players when he became the GM in 1998.

While teams with larger budgets could rely on their money to recruit players, the Oakland A’s had to build a team that could compete with the rest of the league by using Beane’s techniques. This strategy of gaining advantage through statistical evaluation has come to be known as moneyball.

However, not many sports have begun to use these new statistical methods. For example, in hockey, only a few pioneers in the NHL have implemented these ideas.

According to sports statistician and St. Lawrence University professor, Michael Shuckers, “there are at least a handful of teams in the NHL that have folks on staff using moneyball-type ideas, although it is certainly not widespread”.

“The Canucks are the team using these new statistics most extensively,” he continued.  If that is the case, then the Vancouver Canucks GM since 2008-2009, Mike Gillis, may be the closest thing hockey has to a Billy Beane figure.

Shuckers recently garnered significant media attention for his proposal of a new statistic to analyze the performances of goalies, called the Defensive Independent Goalie Rating (DIGR). The idea behind the DIGR is to replace the commonly used save percentage stat, which only calculates the percentage of shots saved by a goalie. The DIGR, rather, takes into account the difficulty of each shot that a goalie faces, providing a more comprehensive analysis. Save percentage is just one of many examples of a statistic that does not accurately reflect a player’s merit but, nevertheless, is often relied upon by managers.

Another suspect statistic is the plus-minus statistic, which calculates the cumulative number of goals scored and allowed in while a player is on the ice. It is often used to evaluate defensemen, since, for the most part, they accumulate less points than their offensive counterparts. The argument that Shuckers and others have against using the plus-minus system is that it does not account for the strength of a team’s goalie or fluke goals, which may unfairly inflate or hurt a player’s “plus-minus” score.

The most popular alternative to the plus-minus is called the Corsi. The Corsi looks not only at goals scored and conceded, but also at shots attempted. It takes into account shots on target, shots missed, and blocked shots. However, the Corsi is still not officially acknowledged or calculated by the NHL, despite pressure from many people within the game.

Both the DIGR and the Corsi are examples of alternative statistics that are not used by official NHL statisticians. This gives the league’s managers an opportunity to use these stats in exciting new ways, which potentially giving them a step up on other organizations who are clinging to the past.

Shuckers says that, for a team to successfully employ efficient statistical analysis beyond what is given to the general public via the NHL official statistics, “there needs to a be a buy-in from the GM’s office.” Gillis has certainly bought into the system, and seems to be employing either these or other effective forms of statistics to build a winning team.

One of the first changes Gillis made was in the scouting department. He adopted a new form of statistical analysis to help his staff find players who normally would not play in the NHL. The acquisition of defensemen Christopher Tanev is a perfect example of this. While NHL scouts usually ignore players in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), Vancouver found Tanev when he was playing for the Rochester Institute of Technology, an NCAA school.

Under Mike Gillis, the Canucks made the Stanley Cup Finals for the first time since 1994. Based on Vancouver’s success with statistics, it may only be a matter of time before the rest of the NHL, and particularly the other six Canadian teams in the NHL, which have all been going through rough periods, catches on.

The Montreal Canadiens have not won a Stanley Cup Final since 1993, the Calgary Flames since 1989, and the Toronto Maple Leafs since 1967. The Edmonton Oilers are coming off a last place finish in the NHL, while the Ottawa Senators seem destined be among the league’s worst teams this season. Then, of course, there are the Winnipeg Jets, who are entering their first year back in the NHL and, therefore, have a nearly clean slate to work with, having changed much of the team they inherited from the now-defunct Atlanta Thrashers.

The first team to truly follow in the footsteps of Gillis and Vancouver may turn around their fortunes with the use of the Corsi, the DIGR, or a new statistic that is out there waiting to replace what is, currently, a flawed model for analyzing the sport.

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The Canadian men’s and women’s national soccer teams both play to crowds of, on average, under 10,000 people in Toronto, while the professional soccer team in the region, Toronto FC, averages attendances of over 20,000 every week. The Canadian men’s national basketball team played a friendly game in Toronto as a warm up to their Olympic Qualifiers this year, and drew only three hundred spectators, whereas the Toronto Raptors habitually fill the Air Canada Centre to capacity for their games. This general indifference to Canadian national teams from the Canadian public represents a serious flaw in the country’s sporting culture, and is a source of frustration for the athletes sporting the Maple Leaf.

Canada is not a country known for outpourings of patriotism ,unlike its southern neighbor, but what does seem to galvanize the country is a story. This fall, an intriguing narrative unraveled in New Zealand of the Canadian team at the Rugby World Cup, one that garnered more patriotic support than a national team would typically receive.

The team’s surprise 25 to 20 come–from-behind win over Tonga in Canada’s first game of the Rugby World Cup was watched by an audience of 138,000 people on TSN in Canada.  This number, on its own, is nothing to fuss over, but, when it is taken into account that the game was played in New Zealand and was shown live at 1:00 a.m. EST in Canada, the number becomes much more impressive.

Aside from the fact that everyone loves an underdog, it was the story of the individual athletes that grabbed the interest of the average fan over a sport that is considered non-mainstream in Canada.

Thirty-one-year-old Pat Riordan splits his time between carpentry and captaining the team. Jamie Cudmore has lived his life overshadowed by his younger brother, who starred as an actor in the X-Men series – he is now getting his time to shine playing as a flanker. These are just two of many interesting storylines that came with the Canadian rugby team, which garnered international media recognition during their time in New Zealand.

After the early win against Tonga, the Canadians put up a valiant effort in ultimately losing games against France and New Zealand, while tying with the Japanese. These results led to a slightly disappointing fourth place finish in the five-team group.

This finish means that Canada does not qualify for the quarterfinals. The team will also not have the same luxury as the world’s top rugby nations of a guaranteed spot in the 2015 World Cup; Canada will have to play their way in again. While this means uncertainty as to whether or not Canada will actually get another chance in the World Cup, it also gives the team an incredible opportunity to build on the support back in Canada. As Cudmore was quick to tell TSN, “There are huge pluses that came out of the World Cup.” Qualifiers at home will give Canadian rugby fans – and Canadian sports fans in general – a chance to support a team that needs and deserves national backing.

The Canadian rugby team is made up of a determined group of athletes who are neither pretentious superstars nor overpaid underachievers. Most importantly, despite having significantly less professional experience than their opponents, they showed that they are true competition, pulling off surprises like beating Tonga and bringing out a few French nerves in an unexpectedly tight game. After the victory over Tonga, Pat Riordan was nearly speechless. He kept his post-match comments to TSN a concise, “That was awesome. Just awesome.”

This is the type of team Canadians should be willing to get behind, as the country slowly changes the way they approach and support their national teams. Gaining the support they deserve from people back home could make the team one worth cheering for.

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