Hanging up the lingerie

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image: Praire dog

image: Praire dog

Canadian LFL season gets postponed until 2014

Article: Brady Lang – Sports Writer

Who doesn’t like drinking a cold stadium beer and watching good-looking grown women go to war on the gridiron?

Well, this season you won’t be able to enjoy that feeling unless you end up at a roller derby.

The Lingerie Football League, newly rebranded as the Legend’s Football League – yes, you read that right – will not be showing up at any stadiums in Canada for the 2013-14 season. The league recently announced that because of a “lack of readiness around the league,” they have postponed the season until 2014-15.

After a year of great, entertaining football, the Regina Rage will not occupy the Brandt Centre, much to the disappointment of football fans all around the Regina area. The team was coming into 2013-14 season with a lot of excitement and tons of potential after a season that ended with a loss to the Saskatoon Sirens, the eventual league finalists.

In the off-season, the team hired former Saskatchewan Roughriders defensive end Brent Hawkins as their new head coach. The former Rider and Jacksonville Jaguar retired from the CFL after an injury-plagued career, but because of a solid connection, started his career behind the bench. Hawkins’ wife, Andrea Cecchini, is also a defensive end and fullback for the squad.

Rage Head Coach Brent Hawkins and player Andrea Cecchini declined an interview with the Carillon.

Now, one has to ask oneself, is this going to be the end of LFL Canada all together? The Saskatoon Sirens’ announced that they released head coach Chris Lambiris and the rest of his staff after they began organizing people to boycott the condensed 2013 season because the group “did not want to put a product on the field that was less than LFL caliber football.”

Mitchell S. Mortaza, the chairman of LFL Global released this statement following the outright release of the Saskatoon coaching staff:

“This is certainly disappointing as we had high expectations for Chris and his staff. However, we as an organization will never be dictated to or have ultimatums placed upon us. We wish Chris and his staff all the best and look forward to a successful return to Saskatoon in 2014.”

The whole situation with the league this season is completely bizarre. After years of the league saying that they are “the fastest growing sport in the nation,” it seems odd how the league could be postponed due to a lack of readiness.

You don’t see other leagues not being ready to start their seasons, so why the LFL?

Maybe because the LFL hasn’t exactly became a mainstay in the Canadian sports culture quite yet. The league contains four teams from three provinces. The B.C. Angels play out of Abbotsford, B.C. while the Saskatoon Sirens and the Regina Rage play out of their respective cities. The Toronto Triumph, who started in the LFL’s original U.S. league in 2011, carried over to LFL Canada and are housed in the Hershey Centre in Mississauga, Ontario.

Last year’s LFL Canada schedule featured a regular season in which the Regina Rage ended up 2-2 and third in the league. The team was destined for big things in 2014, but we will never know how this year’s Rage would have panned out.

We football junkies will have to settle for drinking beer on the couch watching the NFL season or paying for overpriced Pilsner at the, for lack of a better word, streaky Riders at games in Mosaic Stadium. I think I speak for everyone in saying the 2014 LFL Canada season will hopefully be one worth waiting for.

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