Talent search: Bombers looking for players in Florida

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This article was published 17/04/2015 (3289 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Remember the Winnipeg Blue Bombers? Professional football team, long history, play in a little three-down loop called the CFL?

Nothing? Really? All right, how about this — remember the professional sports team in Winnipeg that isn’t the Jets?

There, that’s better.

Well, we interrupt your Stanley Cup playoffs fever this morning to call your attention to the fact the Bombers will this weekend begin in earnest their preparations for a 2015 CFL season they hope will culminate with them hoisting the Grey Cup at Investors Group Field on the final Sunday in November.

Much of the Bombers front office — not to mention the entire scouting department and about 50 CFL rookie prospects — will converge today on the IMG Football Academy in Bradenton, Fla., in advance of Sunday’s opening of the Bombers annual three-day spring mini-training camp.

It’s just the second time the Bombers have held their spring mini-camp in Florida and the club’s brain trust will be delighted if this year’s camp is half as productive as last year’s camp, which produced a total of seven players who are still on the club’s roster — including six who started last season.

It was a spectacular debut for an idea that had been too long in coming for the Bombers. The Bombers — who, until last year, annually held their spring mini-camp indoors at the soccer dome at the University of Manitoba — were among the last teams in the CFL to realize if you want to find the best football prospects, you have to go where they are: the U.S. south.

CFL teams including Montreal, Calgary, Edmonton and Saskatchewan have long been holding their spring camps in Florida, going to where the talent is and then making best use of perfect weather and football facilities to evaluate them.

While it costs a little more to hold your mini-camp in Florida than up in Canada — what you save in travel expenses is more than eaten up by the costs of renting facilities — Bombers GM Kyle Walters says the personnel bonanza his team identified at last year’s camp proves it’s money well spent.

“This is the cost of doing business in the CFL — it really is. Everyone’s doing this and if you want to ensure you have the best players coming to training camp, you need to do this,” Walters said Friday in a phone interview from Bradenton, where the club was holding a free-agent day in advance of the start of mini-camp.

“And last year, we were more or less following a template that other CFL teams were already using. It’s not like we were re-inventing anything here. It was a safe bet from our standpoint.”

So, Walters was asked, would you be satisfied with this year’s camp if it produced as many starters as you got out of last year’s?

“No. I don’t think we’re ever satisfied. We always think we can do better,” said Walters. “We would have liked to have found a better group of receivers last year than we did, for instance. So we’re always trying to get better…

“And the biggest change this year is that we’ve had the entire scouting department together for a year now. We’ve changed the neg list, we’ve visited the NFL camps last year — so that’s going to be the biggest difference is the quality of players we’ll have at this year’s camp will be better.

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“And then just operationally we learned some things last year that will help us run a smoother and more efficient camp this year.”

The Bombers will hold two practices a day in Florida Sunday and Monday and one Tuesday morning before breaking camp and heading back home.

In addition to about 50 rookie prospects, the club will also have its full complement of veteran quarterbacks in Florida, including starter Drew Willy and backups Brian Brohm and Robert Marve.

paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @PaulWiecek

Paul Wiecek
Reporter (retired)

Paul Wiecek was born and raised in Winnipeg’s North End and delivered the Free Press -- 53 papers, Machray Avenue, between Main and Salter Streets -- long before he was first hired as a Free Press reporter in 1989.

   Read full biography