Arden Zwelling
CFL.ca
It couldn’t have been easier.
Lining up as the outside receiver on a three-man bunch formation two yards shy of the end zone, BC Lions wideout Akeem Foster quickly scanned the defence and realized there was something missing — a free safety.
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| Foster says that it’s a blessing to learn from the likes of Geroy Simon – fifth on the CFL’s all-time receiving yards list. |
The Montreal Alouettes, lining up to defend from within their own end zone, had conceded the deep play, opting to line up man-to-man against the Lions who were showing no intention of running the football.
But what the Alouettes did not account for was the quickness of Foster, who took a quick step to his left, tucking into the space between Nick Moore and Shawn Gore who both lined up inside of him, and ran a post towards the middle of the end zone while Moore and Gore darted in the other direction towards the corner flag.
Before he even crossed the goal line, Foster knew he would be wide open in the pocket where the free safety usually sits, immediately throwing up his hand which a couple seconds later gripped his first CFL touchdown.
If you turned your head, you would have missed it. It was one of those rare instances where the offensive play perfectly outmaneuvers the defence. And it’s definitely not supposed to be that easy.
“Nothing special happened. It was a good play and we finished it,” Foster said earlier this week after practice as the Lions prepare to host the Stampeders this Friday in the second week of the season. “It was a beautiful thing.”
The ball itself is sitting in Foster’s locker after a long journey back from Montreal. Foster wants Travis Lulay — the quarterback who threw the pass — to autograph it before he sends it back home to his mom in Ajax, Ontario. It’s a cross-country parcel Foster has been waiting a long time to mail.
The touchdown was actually Foster’s first ever catch in this, his second CFL season, after he split time in 2010 between the Lions active and practice rosters. Foster worked his way into eight games last year but struggled to find playing time behind CFL veterans Paris Jackson and Geroy Simon, along with talented new comers Shawn Gore and Emmanuel Arceneaux.
But now, with Arceneaux off to play for the Minnesota Vikings of the NFL, a spot has opened under the letter Z on the Lions depth chart, otherwise known as the right outside receiver. And the team is going to give Foster the first shot at taking the opening and running with it.
It’s an opportunity Foster is all too happy to seize as he continues to build himself into an all-around player rather than just the offensive star he was with the X-Men at St. Francis Xavier University.
Two plays before his touchdown Foster found himself downfield blocking for exciting Lions import Dobson Collins, who had his teammates in fits in the video room this week as they watched him shake multiple Alouettes defenders on the game tape.
Foster threw a block on the play and was the first player there to help Collins up after a play that was in no way conventional. But neither was calling for a pass to Foster across the middle from the two-yard line when many teams would rather turn to the running game.
That’s the confidence the Lions coaching staff has in this young receiving corps which accounted for 366 of their 426 yards last week in a close 30-26 loss to the Alouettes.
And that’s the confidence Foster is hoping continues to cultivate with the play callers in his sophomore season.
“I’m just trying to be an all-around player. And if it involves me blocking and getting down field I’m more than willing to do that,” Foster said. “And if it involves me running a route and catching a ball for a touchdown there’s nothing wrong with that either.”
Foster is just one of many Lions receivers who might be better coined as cubs. This is as young and inexperienced of a bunch that you can find in the CFL with seven of the ten receivers listed on the Lions active roster being 25 years old or younger and none of that group having more than one full season of CFL experience under their belts.
In fact, four out of the five Lions receivers who tallied receptions against the Alouettes had not caught a single pass in the CFL coming into the game. Gore, Collins and Moore all joined Foster in the ‘first CFL catch’ club during the game.
But that didn’t stop the Lions from attacking through the air, with Lulay tossing up 45 passes and handing the ball off just eight times. Head Coach Wally Buono and the rest of the Lions coaching staff, it seems, were prepared to live and die with their receivers.
“That’s just a credit to the hard work that we put in,” Foster said. “For them to have that confidence in us is a complete honour. We’re going to take that and grow. We’re going to run with it.”
Stuck in the midst of this wide receiver nursery are the elder statesmen Jackson and Simon, two tenured Lions with scary things like bills, children and the type of battle scars that young receivers cannot even begin to understand.
They are joined by CFL journeyman Kamau Peterson who is playing with the fifth team of his 10-season CFL career and entered the league with the Stampeders
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| Foster was a standout at St. Francis Xavier, catching for more than 500 yards in each of his final two years with the X-Men. |
before Foster was even in high school.
If you added up the service time of Foster, Gore, Collins, Moore, rookie Marco Iannuzzi, backup wideout Andrew Harris and second-year slot receiver Steven Black you would have just four years and seven games of CFL experience which doesn’t even come close to touching the mile logged by Simon, Peterson or Jackson.
It’s clear then, who the commanding officers are in this unit.
“Geroy is the absolute leader here no question,” Foster said. “We are kids and we’re growing. But to be able to learn under Geroy and Paris and Kamau is great. For those guys to be around us as we grow and try to get to their level — it’s definitely a blessing.”
It was Simon and Jackson who mentored Foster last year as he readjusted to being a bit player instead of the star after two seasons as one of the most prolific receivers in the CIS. Foster caught more than 500 yards in each of his final two years with the X-Men, one of which included a 2009 All-Canadian season that landed Foster at fifth on the CFL Scouting Bureau’s Top 15 Prospects list.
But when Foster arrived in the CFL the level of clout he had worked so hard to build was reset to zero, a tough adjustment for any young football player used to being a star, especially one with some swagger like Foster.
The impressive physical tools were still evident — including the long 6’4”, 212 lbs. frame and the devastatingly fast first step off the line — but the mental tools weren’t completely there. Early on, Foster got down on himself when he wasn’t performing at the level he thought he could and took his lack of playing time to heart.
“There’s going to be days where you don’t want to come in and practice but you’ve got to battle through it,” Foster said. “Learning how to battle through is a really big thing I learned last year. You have to know when to pick your moments. … You’ve got to be patient and when the time comes, when they call your number, you show up for your teammates.”
Foster was quicker than most to overcome his CFL growing pains. After all, this wasn’t the first time the Ajax native has dealt with adversity. In Foster’s second year at St. Francis Xavier he found out he wouldn’t be playing football that season for academic reasons.
The year off threw a wrench into not only his university career — he was named the X Men rookie of the year the season prior — but also his CFL aspirations. Less time on the field means less game tape and less material for professional scouts.
But Foster, admittedly bigheaded at the time, quickly settled down and got his grades in order, returning to the field the next year to set the CIS on fire for two seasons straight. It was a personal challenge that helped mold Foster as not only a football player but a person.
And without it, Foster may not have had the mental makeup to handle hardship in his first year in the pros.
“I probably would have been very arrogant — I was going down that path,” Foster said, imagining what would have happened if he had not sat out for a year. “It was definitely a humbling experience and it helped shape the fabric of the type of person that I want to be.”
Those are wise, insightful words for a 24-year-old self-proclaimed “kid” who just caught his first pass in the CFL and made it look easy. The Lions, with one of the league’s youngest receiving corps, are simply hoping it rubs off.
