On Queen’s campus, there are countless teams, clubs, and services to get involved in, no matter one’s interest.
For a large population, these interests are sports-related, whether it’s watching the Gaels, a professional league, playing them in intramurals, or casually.
For a smaller population, the goal is to make a Varsity team or club and play for the school they attend.
Unless you’re a part of the few with the talent to be recruited directly out of high school, for most, the journey to becoming a Varsity athlete begins with a tryout.
To learn more about this, The Journal spoke to Cross-Country coach, Mark Bomba, and Men’s Ultimate rookie, Augustin Benoit, ArtSci ’25 to get some insight into the process from both sides of the coin.
For Cross-Country, the process involves training with the existing Varsity team for Coach Bomba to figure out who will be a good fit for the squad.
“We go through about a two- or three-week process to get an assessment and I generally find there’s two things that happen. We end up finding the kids who are a bit more serious and after those two or three weeks, we have the kids who peel off,” Bomba said.
For Men’s Ultimate, with a season that lasts for only a month and a half, the process become a bit more condensed.
“Tryouts will happen the first week of school of every year. […] This year it was three back-to-back days,” Benoit said in an interview with The Journal.
“They really want to see your sports IQ, it’s such a short season, it’s only a month and a half. So, they want to know who already has a feel for the game,” Benoit added.
Despite the differences, the core concept remains the same. Tryouts give athletes a chance to prove themselves to coaches trying to build a winning squad.
For all sports, the spots on each team are limited and both have found that the number of athletes interested are increasing, while the roster sizes have remained the same.
“I think numbers last year, we had 80 people. This year, like over 100 and you could tell there was like 100. It was wild. Like a lot of good players too,” Benoit said.
Behind the scenes, it becomes a delicate juggling act that coaches are keenly aware of.
“I typically try and leave a bit of breath so we can carry up to 50 athletes. And I’m not going to lie to you, that’s when that can be a lot at certain times. He had 11 recruits, we had our normal varsity group, which was 46 athletes, and then we had about another 10 or 15 tryout athletes. So, we had like, probably like 70 kids out there,” Bomba emphasized.
For an athlete it presents the challenge of standing out from the crowd.
“It’s super cliche, but you may have buddies the year before. But come tryouts, you can’t be buddy buddy. […] My mentality is I don’t care until you make the team everything. Just because right now, you got to focus on yourself,” Benoit said.
It’s a common misconception that the best athlete will automatically make the team, however, coaches often weigh the pros and cons of ability and character when making their decisions. There’s a common adage that “the best ability is availability.” It’s often used in reference to injuries, but it’s also true when demonstrating character traits coaches look for.
“If we have an athlete […] for the personality traits, who’s willing to put in the time and willing to put in the work and, all of a sudden they find out, oh, I’m actually more talented than I thought it was,” Bomba said.
In Benoit’s case, having been on the Ultimate B team for the past two years, he’s put in the work for two off seasons straight to make the team.
“Preparation starts mid-October. Like, as soon as the season’s done, you’re thinking, at least I am, and I think a lot of people do are thinking about the next year,” Benoit said.
When tasked with putting in work, it’s easy to put pressure on yourself to make the team, however, Benoit added the importance of not letting your emotions play a factor.
“Don’t let your emotions get the better of you, because that’s not going to help you during selection either,” he added.
And once you’ve put in all the work, all you can do is hope.
“I ended up waking up at like 2 a.m. because I just couldn’t sleep. I checked and I saw I made the team,” Benoit said. “That was huge, but it was super rewarding and a crazy feeling. A lot of work goes into it.”
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