Junior football team on verge of folding

BY MICHAEL PIASETZKI

Barring the sudden emergence of an area saviour who would take over the team financially and manage it, a football tradition in the West Island will soon be no more.

The Pierrefonds-based Quebec Junior Football League North Shore Broncos could fold operations as early as this week.

“The situation has changed dramatically with the team over the past few years,” said Broncos president, governor and director of operations Joe Berghello, who also serves as current president of the North Shore Football League (NSFL), which for the past 12 years has operated the Broncos. “We have begun losing a lot of players to CEGEP, and it’s getting more and more difficult to attract volunteers, and operating the team involves a ton of work. The calibre of players on the team isn’t what it used to be either. But perhaps most important is this: the NSFL perspective has always been to teach football. How much teaching is actually done at the junior level?”

One of the league’s founding franchises along with the Châteauguay Raiders in 1981, the club’s raison d’être has always been to provide an option for players still at university and wishing play for a varsity team afterward or for those attending CEGEPs that don’t offer football programs, or for those in CEGEPs that do have football teams but who would prefer another option. Its practice schedule tended to be lighter than those of CEGEP teams, offering players an alternative if they had part-time jobs. Up until recently, under the management of Joe Dawson and most recently Joe and Heather Berghello, that raison d’être worked. The Broncos won the Manson Cup in 1995, and remained competitive for several years afterwards, even making it back to the title game in 2000, which it lost.

However, over the past four or five years, things began to sour for the club. The St. Léonard Cougars of the Canadian Junior Football League began draining its talent pool, recruiting and snagging many of the finest graduating midget AAA North Shore Mustangs and Lakeshore Cougars who wished to play junior ball. On the field, for reasons unbeknownst to knowledgeable observers, it consistently played undisciplined football, taking far too many penalties. Meanwhile, off the field, nasty incidents such as the one that occurred a couple of years ago at Riverdale High School in Pierrefonds, which saw a spectator come on the field at halftime and pull a knife on one of the Broncos players, helped tar the team’s image.

“I think it’s a shame,” said Jim States, head coach of the Broncos for the past two years who did not plan on returning for a third year due to family and job commitments. “I feel bad for the young guys. They’re not going to have a junior football program in the West Island, and unless they’re willing to travel, won’t be able to play football anymore. They’re the ones who will suffer the most.”

Quebec Junior Football League president Joe Pistilli, said he had been aware of the Broncos’ problems for a couple of months, but had been waiting for a phone call from Berghello, some good news to help turn things around.

That phone call he said, simply never came.쇓