PERFECT STORM: Chapter 1 — Football team years in making became legendary

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This article was published 17/06/2020 (2181 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The 1987 Crocus Plainsmen football team is the greatest high school team out of Brandon for more reasons than one. The main one is already special: They are the only non-Winnipeg team to capture a provincial title in 87 years of Winnipeg High School Football League history.

But the legacy of that team lives on like none other with more than 10 players moving on to junior or post-secondary football and even more giving back to the game as coaches. Coming on 33 years since their undefeated run, that team is the reason football thrives in the Wheat City today.

The Plainsmen were accepted for the Football Manitoba Hall of Fame Class of 2020, though the induction was pushed back to September 2021 due to COVID-19. For the next two weeks, The Brandon Sun looks back at the season and the characters who made it happen through their eyes.

BEFORE THE FINAL

In just their second year in the Winnipeg High School Football League, the Plainsmen found themselves on the doorstep of history. After a perfect 7-0 regular season and two famous playoff victories, Crocus had a matchup with a high-flying Daniel McIntyre Maroons team it beat 20-15 a month prior. Written off or relatively unknown by most inside the Winnipeg perimeter, the team led by head coach Doug Steeves and defensive coordinator Larry Hogue was 48 minutes from an all-time great statement in western Manitoba sports history.

Nov. 7, 1987, inside the Crocus locker room at the Velodrome:

MIKE STEEVES (WR): “You think of a team like Daniel Mac who was a high-flying team … a team that regularly put up 35, 45 points. They had an amazing quarterback and a couple of receivers that went to play at the next level. If you look at their scorecards through the year, they were dominating teams also.”

KEVIN GRINDEY (DB): “I had to cover a receiver that was six-foot-three and he had received the sports star of the week the week before … I was five-seven and a half and the coaches came to me and said Kevin, you’re going to cover this guy.”

COREY DINSDALE (DT): “It would have been a really nervous locker room. The coaches did well to keep everyone grounded though. Everybody had so much respect for their coaches. Larry and Doug and the coaching staff, they did such a good job preparing us for that moment.”

DEAN JONES (LB): “We played those guys in the regular season so we had a feeling of confidence about playing those guys again. We knew they relied on throwing a fair amount and we felt extremely confident that we could stop that. We never felt they had a chance to run against us.”

SCOTT MOORE (LB): “I looked at our team with confidence. I remember sitting in that dressing room and I remember different guys I can still picture to this day, Darren McTaggart listening to Def Leppard’s ‘Animal’ in his walkman, blasting. He was ready. Everyone was ready. Kevin Boyd, his eyes always got bigger before a game. We were ready. There was no doubt in my mind we were going out there and we were going to win that football game.”

 

LAYING THE GROUND WORK

The high school football season itself is short. Two months prior, no one knew what this team could be or expected a whole lot. But those who were part of it knew it didn’t just start with the season opener, or training camp for that matter.

ROB PINK (RT): “You have to go back probably two years early from that … There was a guy who played football at Crocus by the name of Dave Bryant … Randy Hedberg, he played for the Oakland Raiders, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, he would go down to Minot (State) and to this day, Randy Hedberg swears that Dave was the best running back he had seen in his life. Dave Bryant in high school was somebody everybody looked up to. He set the tone for every practice and the intensity level of Dave Bryant at the high school level was off the charts. Really for two years, everybody that was below him really wanted to be like Dave Bryant as far as practice went. By the time Dave left, he was around the scene at the high school the next year after and everybody was still wanting to be Dave Bryant. I think that’s where the intensity came for our team, he was setting the tone for that.”

SCOTT SCHAEFFER (DE): “When I was in Grade 10 I was fortunate enough to play on the varsity team … Dave was a machine. Dave was the MVP of what we played in called the midget league. Dave was to my knowledge, only the fifth or sixth football athlete out of Brandon to go to college and play college football and go to the States. It was a real eye-opener to see somebody with that quality of talent, size and speed. … To see what it would take to try and get to that next level.”

GRINDEY: “Growing up friends with Mike Steeves, my story really started a lot earlier. We were pretty good friends before we went to high school … Mike and I loved the sport so much. It was our favourite thing to do. In Grade 6 we would play a game called dream ball with Jeff Fawcett. You actually didn’t have a football. You’d just have a quarterback, a receiver and defensive back and you’d pretend to throw the football and surprisingly there weren’t a lot of arguments about whether it was caught or intercepted … Really it was just a tackling game. Mike and I would line up in front of Valleyview school. I would pretend to kick him the football, he’d pretend to catch it and we’d meet in the middle and tackle each other.”

ROB CULLEN (C): “A very talented group of young men who really became good over the summer. Coach Steeves put us all into a senior men’s flag football league. … The culture of being around football went two days a week through the summer until we started in the fall and it was bred right into us … I don’t know if we really knew at the time there would be a special reason for it, but I guess a lot of us that coach now or played at the next level look back and realize that what Coach Steeves and Coach Hogue were doing was really putting us in a position to be better people in the long run throughout the season.”

GRINDEY: “(Mike Steeves and I) went together to Crocus Plains and worked hard. Every summer we trained, we lifted weights and we ran the hill just like Walter Payton did in his 1985 Crunch Course video. We trained so hard, we went to Legion camps and all these things just to give ourselves the best chance of playing football.”

MOORE: “I’d been to camps that summer, I’d tried out for provincial teams and I’d been all over the place at different camps. I was quite into football and keeping an eye on where we are going … I went to the Peace Gardens camp and there was these guys from the Winnipeg teams. I was thinking to myself, me, Kevin Grindey and Mike Steeves, we were down there and we were competitive with these guys. Why can’t we be as good as them? I started thinking.”

 

PRE-SEASON

When everyone came together for training camp in August, it didn’t look like your average high school football squad. That was most prevalent on the offensive line.

STEEVES: “We were almost as big as the Winnipeg Blue Bombers at the time and were 15 pounds bigger on average than U of M. The number of players offensive line wise that went on, Derek Sholdice, Pat Pink, Rob Pink, Kevin Boyd, Rob Cullen, those guys are going to the next level and playing at a high level of football. That was an amazing group of characters … You had guys like Jeff Martinook come over from Neelin. He was a phenomenal athlete who was 5-10, 200 pounds and benching 300 pounds. You looked at some of these athletes and you knew we had a good team.”

ROB PINK: “You know where that hill that Walmart is, that big hill we’d run up on Saturday morning? Quite a few people used to puke up on that hill. There were no coaches there to push us along, it was just a group of guys would go up, get people to gather and off we’d go running. There was a lot of vomit spilled on that hill to get ready for football.”

STEEVES: “Football’s such a team sport that you have to become a team, you’re not going to win by individual effort. It was really ‘How could this team be brought together?’ I chuckle looking at this list of kids on this team and what phenomenal athletes they were, and some of them weren’t great football players, but because they were such phenomenal athletes, it transferred well.”

SCHAEFFER: “Nobody thought we were that good at the outset of the season. I remember at the start of the season we had four captains … two from offence and two from defence. Our offensive captains were Kevin Boyd, our guard, Brent Naisby, a wide receiver, Scott Moore, a middle linebacker and myself … None of us are really skill positions per se when you think about it, so it wasn’t going into the season we thought we were going to be league champions and go undefeated.”

 

THURSDAY: Leaders and head coach

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CHAPTERS

June 17: Introduction

June 18: The head coach

June 19: Key additions

June 20: Dominant defence

June 22: Offensive line

June 23: Captain Kevin Boyd

June 24: Regular season sweep

June 25: The playoffs

June 26: The title game

June 27: Aftermath