As high school football teams across Georgia look to fill open dates in their 2024 schedules, some coaches are going to great lengths to complete their 10-game regular season schedules. For Mary Persons head football coach Brian Nelson, that means welcoming a team from north of the border. And I’m not talking about Tennessee or North Carolina. Think farther north – as in Canada.
Mary Persons will play its second game of the 2024 football season on Aug. 30 against New Westminster Secondary School from British Columbia, Canada.
Nelson said that he was having trouble finding an opponent for Aug. 30 when he received an email about another team looking for a game on that same date.
“I got the coach’s name and email, so we started talking, and it turned out to be a team from Canada,” Nelson said.
That team was New Westminster Secondary School from just outside Vancouver, British Columbia.
Nelson said that New Westminster’s coach explained that once every three or four years they scheduled a travel game somewhere in the United States and that they were interested in coming to Georgia.
“We exchanged emails, texts, and continued to talk by phone, and realized that we both wanted to do this,” Nelson said.
But there were some logistical challenges to take care of, namely getting permission from each team’s respective governing association to play the game.
“We had to dot some I’s and cross some T’s with the GHSA, and they had to do the same thing with their Provincial Association,” Nelson said.
And just like that, the Mary Persons Bulldogs will host the New Westminster Hyacks in Forsyth, Georgia, to open the 2024 football season.
Who is New Westminster? And What Exactly Is a Hyack?
Although the city of New Westminster is located in British Columbia and home to the BC Lions, a Canadian Football League team, the New Westminster Secondary School Hyacks play American-style football.
Darnell Sikorski and Andrew McKechnie serve as the Hyacks’ co-head coaches, and they said their brand of football is very much like that of any other American high school football team.
“We play a 10-game regular season, and offensively we run a shotgun-based wing-T with a 40 defense,” Sikorski said.
The school has a long history of football, although McKechnie said the football program went away in the mid 1970s until it was resurrected in 2003. Since then the team has enjoyed its fair share of success.
“We are a strong football program up here in British Columbia,” Sikorski said. “Since 2003 we have won one provincial championship in 2017 and (made) multiple Final Four appearances.”
A provincial championship in British Columbia is the equivalent of a state championship in Georgia, and making it to the Final Four would be equal to a semifinals appearance in the state, or provincial, playoffs.
To win a provincial championship requires playing 13 games versus the 15 that are played to win a state title in Georgia’s high school football playoffs.
McKechnie said that although football is popular, it’s not the most popular sport in British Columbia.
“Up here hockey is king, no doubt about it, and Lacrosse is huge also,” McKechnie said.
That leaves football to pick from the remaining athletes, he said.
New Westminster competes in Class 3A in British Columbia’s Secondary Schools Football Association and has a roster of approximately 40 players, Sikorski said.
He also explained the meaning of the team’s mascot and how the school adopted the mascot nickname.
“Hyack means ‘fleet of foot’ in Native Canadian,” Sikorski said. “The city experienced a major fire in the 1900s, and the Native American firefighters helped fight the fire. They moved extremely swiftly in doing so.”
‘Let’s Go to Georgia’
New Westminster schedules an away game against a U.S. opponent, what they call a travel game, approximately every three to four years.
So far the Hyacks have played in three travel games. Their first was in California in 2011, and their second was in Texas in 2014. They lost both games.
In 2017 the team went back to California to face Linfield Christian for New Westminster’s third travel game.
“They (Linfield Christian) featured four Division I players that year, two of whom went on to become multiple-year starters in the Pac-12,” Sikorski said.
New Westminster defeated Linfield Christian, picking up their first travel-game win.
About a year ago, Sikorski and McKechnie decided it was time for the team to schedule their fourth travel game after being forced to delay it due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
They considered returning to California or Texas, but then the two coaches had an idea: Why not go somewhere different?
“We were really intrigued by Georgia,” Sikorski said. “It’s a Top 3 state for high school football.”
The coaches put the word out that they were interested in scheduling a game within 90 miles of Atlanta. That’s when Nelson answered their email, and the decision was made: “Let’s go to Georgia.”
Mary Persons Versus New Westminster Game Is About More Than Just Football
When he was considering the game against New Westminster, Nelson said that he knew it was different from anything he had ever done, which was a big part of what drew him to the game.
“I thought at the end of the day it would make for a unique experience and memory for our kids playing a team from another country,” Nelson said. “This is something they will be talking about years from now.”
The New Westminster coaches understand that the impact on their team goes much farther than just football.
“Nobody on our roster has ever been to Georgia,” Sikorski said. “We plan to visit the College Football Hall of Fame and other local landmarks.”
The New Westminster team plans to arrive in Atlanta a week ahead of the game before making their way down to Middle Georgia on game day.
