Toronto Argonauts head coach Marc Trestman during the game against the Montreal Alouettes at Percival-Molson Stadium in Montreal, QC, Friday, August 11, 2017. (Photo: Johany Jutras)
The CFL season is a long one. Teams report to camp in May and if they’re lucky, play through until the end of November.
It can be a grind. Early mornings, team meetings, endless hours of video, daily practices, workouts, and regular visits to the medical staff to recover from a substantial injury, or to prevent a small injury from getting worse.
That’s just at the facility. Most players also watch video when they’re at home.
One thing that makes the tedium bearable is the weekly competition. Players and coaches live for game day, it’s what makes the seemingly endless hours of preparation worthwhile.
There’s one other ingredient important to a player’s mindset, something the Toronto Argonauts haven’t done much of this season, winning. It’s always a little more fun around a facility when a team is having success.
Conversely, a team with a collective mindset that’s negative is in all likelihood not going to win many games.
The Boatmen have drifted into choppy water to begin the 2018 season, listing to a 1-4 record and sailing this week to where the Red and Assiniboine rivers meet.
These are virtually uncharted waters for Marc Trestman, especially in the CFL, where in his six years in the league his teams have finished first five times and won three Grey Cups.
“We know we have to embrace the adversity that’s hit our football team,” said Trestman. “It’s real. Our guys know it’s real and now we’re on a short week and short weeks count as much as long weeks. It’s been a while, but I’ve been on teams that have gone through this kind of adversity and have overcome it and won championship games.”
While every team goes through injuries, losing a star quarterback can be devastating. James Franklin is learning on the job and has great potential, but when Ricky Ray went down with a neck injury the Argos found themselves without a QB who threw for over 5,500 yards and almost 30 TDs last year, leading his team to two last-minute playoff wins.
Some may complain about the Fates conspiring against the Argos when that happened, but their head coach won’t go there.
“We’re not making excuses for injuries,” said Trestman. “We’re not making excuses for our record. We know what we are and who we are, we’re a 1-4 team and we’re trying to carry ourselves like a team that’s much better than that. We’ve got to do that every day in practice and we’ve got to find a way to do that on Friday night.”
Trestman has an advantage at his disposal, a room full of veterans, most of whom tasted the spoils of a championship just eight short months ago.
One of those players is linebacker Marcus Ball, perhaps the most vocal of the team’s leadership group. His phrase ‘Today is the day!’ was a rallying cry en route to last season’s Grey Cup title and is engraved on the inside of the championship rings.
The veteran is a consummate professional day in and day out, and knows how to clean things up when all is not going as planned.
“The first thing I do is I critique myself,” Ball told Argonauts.ca. “I look back at everything that the coach will say that I’ve done right. I find those things and I work on ways to continue to do those things right, but more importantly, I find out everything that I’ve done wrong and I try to fix my wrongs by just going to the basics of whatever technique it is that I need to do.”
Long-time NFL coach Bill Parcels had the quote “You are what your record says you are,” and as Trestman said, the Argos are a 1-4 team. But unlike the NFL there’s a longer schedule here, something that benefits the Boatmen.
“We’re in a fortunate league,” said Ball. “We’ve got 18 regular-season games and fortunately for us we haven’t hit the Eastern side of our schedule. We still have each and every one of our team goals very much there for the taking, we just have to trust in the process, the S.J. Green method, and take it day by day and win each and every meeting each and every day.”
There’s that ‘P word’ again, process. It’s a word used a lot around the Argo facility, because it’s a word they firmly believe it, whether it be Ball, Green, or the Head Coach.
“We’ve always focused on the process of how we do things here and we don’t change the process,” said Trestman. “We try to send messages in different ways, but they’re the same messages. This week it’s ‘Are we really champions?’ Those of us who have been champions, this is a day to show it, these are the days that we have to show it. The only way to honour the game is to act like a champion, because the game doesn’t care if you were one or not, so we have to carry ourselves like that, and that means our demeanour, the things we say, the words we use, how we work, the process that we’re working under.”
The leadership of players like Ball, Chris Van Zeyl and Cassius Vaughn will be relied upon to keep the locker room focused while the Argos navigate these rough waters.
A positive mindset and a trust in the process will go a long way toward getting the Argos through these difficult days.