VANCOUVER – Back at the U SPORTS National Championship for an eighth straight season, the UBC Thunderbirds open the quest for a 14
th banner in program history against St. Francis Xavier on Thursday, November 9
th in Sydney, Nova Scotia.
Having drawn the tournament's seventh seed, the 'Birds will face the second seeded AUS Champion X-Men for their quarter-final game, the first time the two have met at nationals since 2019.
"They've been at nationals fairly regularly over the last five or so years. (Head coach Graham Kennedy) is running a good program there and they've got some good players," said UBC head coach
Mike Mosher, now at his eighth straight national tournament. "I know several of their players were up in the rankings in the AUS All-Star nominations and they got a guy in Charlie Waters who's been a top performer in U SPORTS over the last many years having been at Cape Breton prior to going to St. FX. There are no easy games. Every team has good coaches and teams are going to be prepared. We'll have to do our homework and get ourselves prepared and ready to go, and we will."
St. FX advanced to their first tournament since 2019 having earned the AUS title with a 2-0 victory over the national champion host Cape Breton Capers on October 29.
The Thunderbirds saw their streak of five straight Canada West titles come to an end on Saturday with a 1-0 loss to the host Mount Royal Cougars who enter this week's Championship as the number one seed. That conference title game was just the second loss for UBC on the season and despite heading to Cape Breton as the number seven seed, it's hard to envision the T-Birds, or any team for that matter, being counted out of the running come Sunday.
"It seems like every year the standard at nationals has gotten better and better," said Mosher who has four national championship titles under his belt as UBC's head coach. "I can say that with having had our team there consistently over the last 15 years or so and there's no doubt the standard is a lot better than where it was 10 or 15 years ago. It seems like a lot of the same teams are emerging on a regular basis because they have done the business week in, week out and year in, year out. This year you look at it and probably the top two teams over the course of the season in each conference have gotten there. There's certainly going to be no easy games."
The T-Birds are in search of a record 14
th national championship title this week having come as close as they possibly could without securing it last year in Kamloops, falling on penalty kicks in the gold match against the host WolfPack.
This year's tournament features five of the same teams from 2022 including the Montreal Carabins who face the Carleton Ravens in the other quarter-final on the same side of the bracket as the T-Birds.
The last meeting between UBC and St. FX came in a consolation semifinal at the 2019 tournament in Montreal where the T-Birds earned a 2-0 victory.
Despite the nearly 6000 kilometres and four hours' time difference between Vancouver and Sydney, the 'Birds aren't unfamiliar with such challenges, having attended nationals in Montreal and Ottawa in 2019 and 2022, respectively.
"The fact we just turned the clocks helps a little bit and that almost negates an hour and we were already in the mountain time zone this past weekend. Those are the little things and we'll get to train on the field a couple days which is a good thing and try to re-set the body clocks as best we can."
UBC's quarter-final against the X-Men begins at 9:30 a.m. PT Thursday with the winner advancing to one of two semifinals the following day. The game will be available live on
CBC Sports' YouTube Page and
CBC Gem.
