Just A Gal From Glidden: Still cheering from the sidelines

By Kate Winquist

It has been a crazy, hectic week.

It seems once September rolls around, everything gets turned up a notch. Kids are headed back to school, and with that comes all the extracurricular activities that go along with it.

Now that my children are grown, I thought things might slow down a bit. No more running home to make lunches, figuring out who needs to be where and when, or picking somebody up from football practice.

I do miss watching the games, though.

Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy covering the local teams, but it's different watching from the sidelines as a parent compared to watching as an "impartial" newspaper reporter.

I put "impartial" in quotation marks because, let's face it, we all have our biases.

A couple of weeks ago, the Kindersley Kobras played the Shaunavon Shadows in an exhibition game. Shaunavon was a place I called home for 20 years, from 1992 to 2012, so there are a lot of memories tied up in that community.

I sent our summer student, Evan, to cover the game.

Before he left, he asked me who I was cheering for.

I must admit, I had to think about it for a few extra seconds.

"The Kobras, of course!”

But there's still a little part of me that has a soft spot for the team from southwest Saskatchewan.

In fact, when Evan brought back the game sheet, I recognized more Shaunavon names than I did Kindersley names. Truthfully, that made me feel a little old.

Game face, size small. Devin Winquist lines up for his first game with the Swift Current Jaguars minor football team in 2013. PHOTO BY KATE WINQUIST

Doing the dirty work. Devin Winquist (51) throws a block to spring a Gull Lake Lions teammate during a fall 2019 game in his senior season. PHOTO BY KATE WINQUIST

Our oldest son, Devin, loves football. He started playing minor football in Swift Current and learned some valuable skills there that prepared him for high school football after we moved to Gull Lake.

And if you know Gull Lake, you know it might be a small community, but it has a proud football tradition.

How could it not? Gull Lake is the hometown of Canadian Football League Hall of Fame offensive lineman Roger Aldag.

Years ago, when I ran the Gull Lake Advance, I came across a full-page, broadsheet-sized advertisement honouring the 1968 provincial champion Gull Lake Lions.

There, among all those young football players, was a very young Roger Aldag.

It was kind of surreal.

I ended up having the page framed, and when we eventually moved away from Gull Lake, I gave it to longtime Lions coach Neil Boutin. It seemed like that was where it belonged.

All these years later, we're still watching young football players from our little corner of Saskatchewan make names for themselves.

Now we find ourselves cheering for players like Logan Ferland, who went to Westberry School right here in Kindersley, and Daniel Wiebe, who played for the Rosetown High School team before making his mark with the University of Saskatchewan Huskies.

Different generation. Different players. Same small-town pride.

They say it takes a village to raise a child. Around here, I think it also takes a whole bunch of people sitting in bleachers, standing along fences, driving to practices, working the chains, coaching after work, selling 50/50 tickets, washing uniforms and hollering themselves hoarse on Friday nights.

For a few years, those kids on the field are ours.

Then suddenly, they're grown.

Our own children have had their time in the sun. The football equipment gets returned, the cleats get put away and eventually we're no longer sitting in the stands as somebody's mom or dad.

But then the next group comes along.

Maybe that's one of the best things about living in a small community. You don't necessarily stop cheering when your own kids grow up.

You just start cheering for somebody else’s.

And every once in a while, one of those kids we've watched grow up, from the playground to the football field, hockey rink, ball diamond or basketball court, goes farther than any of us imagined.

Some even make it to the big leagues.

And when they do, an entire little corner of Saskatchewan gets to say:

"We knew him when.”