It’s Thursday and there’s no Ontario Junior B Lacrosse game tonight in Owen Sound.
In fact, it likely will be about 10 months before the Garb & Gear NorthStars hit the floor in early May of 2014.
The NorthStars missed the playoffs this year with a record of 2 & 18, marking the third straight season Owen Sound has failed to grab a playoff berth.
Talking to Garb & Gear Coach & General Manager Keith Peer this week, there were a variety of factors, certainly not excuses, for the record this season.
Among the factors that had to be somewhat coaxed out of Peer was the absence of at least a half dozen candidates who are playing Junior A Lacrosse.
From my viewpoint there’s been a distinct shift where at one time a decade ago, one star player from Owen Sound Minor Lacrosse played somewhere in Junior A.
This year, by our count, there were 8 Minor Lacrosse grads playing at the Junior A level.
And that’s great……And that’s awful.
And most of all, that’s a big challenge for Keith Peer and the NorthStars to appeal to those have departed and maybe more so, attempt to prevent another exodus of graduating Minor Lacrosse players who might be the best group of players in a long time.
I’m Fred Wallace