The football team wants to redeem itself after a tough first couple of games.
With a difficult start to the season and an early bye week, the Concordia Stingers are looking to bounce back in their homecoming game against the McGill Redbirds on Saturday.
The Stingers played their last game on Sept. 3 at Sherbrooke and fell 23-24 to the Vert & Or. Concordia is currently 0-2 on the season and ranked before last in the conference, in the Réseau du Sport Étudiant du Québec (RSEQ).
Stingers’ quarterback Olivier Roy said that this bye week was mostly about focusing on the mental aspect of the game.
“The only thing we want to do is get back on the field and get a chance to redeem ourselves,” he said.
But with bye week, it was a long two weeks without games, so the Stingers wanted to make sure everyone was still focused.
“Our execution level has to be better than what it was for our first two games,” Roy said, which is something they work on by practicing. “One of the good things about bye weeks is that you get a head start on your opponent when they’re still focusing on the game they have [that] week.”
Roy added that they were already looking at McGill film last week while the Redbirds were still preparing for their game against Sherbrooke.
Something the team is looking to improve on is to start the game at a faster pace, and to play throughout the entire 60 minutes.
The Stingers had a better start in their second game scoring first, but they emphasized the need to play a full game.
Head coach Brad Collinson said the message over the past two weeks has been to “play Concordia football the way we know we can play,” which is something he said they haven’t done yet.
Collinson added that bye weeks are never really fun but they are an opportunity to improve.
“We think we got better during the week… we practiced three times, we cleaned up some things,” he said.
“We have to go out there and have fun and have a pleasure being out there on the football field. Guys spend a lot of work for this, we just want them to have fun and be loose,” Collinson concluded.
