Bonnyville Renegades win league title, to host Provincials

The Bonnyville Renegades are the champs, but could go on to being the best in the province this weekend.

Travelling down to Lloydminster on Sunday and braving the elements, the Renegades upset the Lloyd Steelers 26-18, avenging a regular season loss to the Border City team, and winning the fourth league banner in the Renegades history.

“It couldn’t have went any better,” said head coach Colin Hanusz. “In the months since we played them, we’d worked on a number of different offensive plays, and kind of refined them in the other games when playing against the other teams, and it paid off.” 

Paid off might be an understatement.

The Steelers shutout the Renegades 40-0 in their previous matchup and had only allowed six points all season.

But the first play gave Bonnyville confidence and rattled their opponents.

Hunter Prybysh returned the opening kickoff all the way back to the house for a touchdown.

“That really set the tone. It was quite a look of shock on their face. And it gave me a sense of belief in our players that we could beat this team,” said Hanusz. 

The Renegades never trailed the rest of the way, despite the score remaining close. It was 20-18 before the Renegades punched home a decisive touchdown. But the Steelers passing game could not rally their squad, and Bonnyville was able to close out the upset.

“The pride I feel for this team is just immense,” he said. 

“When we went down to Lloyd for our league championship game, our parents and fans came in droves, to the point that we had more fans than the Lloydminster team did at home.

“We had a really good relationship with our Bandits [Bantam] team and we did a lot of practices together at the start of the season. I think that went a long ways doing blocking and tackling drills with them, for our kids to come up and see these older kids and how they do it, and to learn from them. We focused on the fundamentals of blocking and tackling all year. And when it came down to it in this game, we were better than them at making tackles and making blocks. And the kids won the game for us,” said Hanusz. 

The Renegades ended a six-year drought by winning the league championship, after previous Bonnyville peewee teams repeated as champs from 2014 to 2016.

Now, they look to do what has only been done once before — win a Provincial championship.

On Saturday, the Renegades welcome the Red Deer Steelers, winners of the Central Alberta Peewee Football League to Walsh Field to decide the best in Alberta.

Kickoff is at 2:00pm and everyone is welcome to be loud and pack the stands for a rare Provincial final in Bonnyville.

“We have one provincial banner hanging in our dressing room. And I’ll tell you right now, there’s a lot of boys on our team who want to make it two.”