The Creighton Kodiaks will not have a perfect season. The team took their first loss since 2019 last week after a hard-fought tilt on the road against Cumberland House.
The Oct. 5 battle between the two top teams in northern Saskatchewan - the Kodiaks and Cumberland House’s Charlebois Community School Islanders - started out with a lead for the home team, who went up 14-6 after one quarter and 28-18 at halftime in their home-opening game. The Kodiaks would battle back in the third quarter to tie the game at 34-all, but the Islanders snuck away, first picking up a safety to take the lead back and then running away with the victory, scoring 30 points in the fourth quarter to make it a 66-42 finish.
The Kodiaks gave up more than twice as many points to the Islanders than they had in all four of their previous games combined.
“We knew it was going to be a tough game,” said Kodiaks head coach Ryan Karakochuk.
“I think people have the assumption that we've been so dominant, I think people get shocked when we have a close game or if we lose. I knew it was going to be a very tough game, just because I'm aware of the league, I'm aware of the players, I'm aware that they have around 10 seniors, which is a high number in high school football and it was their home opener. I knew they were going to be very pumped up and they were.”
Karakochuk gave credit to the Islanders and their coach, Brent Tunstall, saying Tunstall outcoached him. A key to the game was the amount of turnovers - Creighton coughed the ball up six times while the hosts didn’t give it up once - and unsuccessful converts, often from bad snaps or quick Islander defence.
“We had six fumbles that Cumberland recovered and another three that we were lucky to jump on and get back. You start with that, you lose the turnover battle 6-0 since they had none, that’s six possessions - six times when we could have possibly scored and didn’t,” said Karakochuk.
“If you give the ball that many times back to them, you’re going to pay a price.”
The loss puts the Kodiaks at 4-1 on the year with one regular season game left - - the Kodiaks will face the Chief Ahtahkakohp Titans from Ahtahkakoop Cree Nation Oct. 13 at Creighton’s Oval of Dreams.
Creighton will finish second in the league’s regular season standings, already being out of reach for the third-place Hector Thiboutot Community School T-Wolves from Sandy Bay - since the Kodiaks beat the now 3-2 T-Wolves earlier this year, the Kodiaks hold a tiebreaker over them.
The loss also confirms that the Kodiaks will face the Islanders again in the league final, which will be played on the top team’s home field. The final this year will be played on the road at Cumberland House, as the Islanders have clinched first place - even if Sandy Bay upsets Cumberland House in their game this week and Creighton beats the Titans, the Islanders will still hold the first place tiebreaker.
With the league championship game now being played in hostile confines, Karakochuk said the Kodiaks will need to prepare more and learn from the loss if the team has a shot at repeating.
“It'll be very hard to play there, but in all honesty, they had to do it last year - they had to come to Creighton and they lost in the regular season and then had to come back in the final. We took care of business there. Now we’ve just got to go back and win a road game and and learn from our mistakes and look better and we'll see where the chips fall,” said the coach.
“This was a great experience for our team. We needed this - not to lose, it would have been nice to win, no doubt about it - but the experience that our guys got from this game… this was a real football game. The last four weeks have been football, but not a real football game. Anyone who's watched it knows that we were a superior team in all the other games that we played. This one was back and forth. Every yard was tough. Every mistake was that much bigger and it was very entertaining.”
Both the Islanders and Kodiaks will also represent the northern league against southern opponents in provincial conference games later this fall. The Islanders will likely play St. Brieux in their matchup, while Creighton will play the undefeated Wakaw Warriors on the road.
The Kodiaks will host Ahtahkakoop in their last home game of the season Thursday at 3:30 p.m. local time.
“Our goal is to stay healthy, get our rookies in, finish the year at home, give the fans one last hurrah for our kids - that's how we're going to approach this week,” said Karakochuk.
“The minute that game is over… I'll be dissecting the tape all weekend, there's no doubt about it. It's just burning inside of me. I will go with the team and we'll go through the tape what we did wrong on every play, what they did right, then we'll start to build a game plan.”
