The Misfits: Damon Allen & Anthony Cannon find new rewards w/ women’s team
Photo courtesy: Lance Freeman
“After one tournament, me and Damon got fired.”
Anthony Cannon remembers well how The Misfits were born, in the aftermath of he and Damon Allen being tossed overboard by the first women’s touch football team they’d ever coached.
Pro football? Of course the two of them knew a lot. Touch football? Well, they had a lot to learn.
It was rather undignified, being relieved of their duties after just one weekend, but that’s what happened to the former pro linebacker and to the hall of fame quarterback.
“We still laugh about it to this day,” says Allen and, yes, he’s laughing when he says it.
It’s funny, and not just because the two of them were let go even though one of them played three seasons in the NFL as well as one with the Toronto Argonauts, the other throwing for more than 72,000 passing yards on his way to four Grey Cup championships.
It’s also funny to them because it led Cannon and Allen to forming a new women’s touch football team, self-teasingly calling it ‘The Misfits.’
The Misfits have grown into something the two can be proud of, both on the field and off; something that provides growth for the young women who want to be better football players, yes. But it’s also something that has provided growth for the two men from the bruising world of tackle football. They’ve gotten to learn more about a different type of game.
Through four seasons, The Misfits have become a band of brothers and sisters bound by stories so intriguing that a Toronto filmmaker would like to feature them in a documentary series.
“It just sucks you in like a vortex,” says that filmmaker, Toronto’s Julian Wierzbicki, of the story of the Misfits. “I can honestly say I’m more passionate about this as a project, than anything that I’ve ever pitched.”
“It’s absolutely more than football.”
***
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“To see how far we’ve gone in just three years is it’s so amazing,” says 28-year-old Ellen Bruna, who joined the Misfits soon after coming to Canada from her native Brazil. “I love it. I really love it. And I hope we can stay together for a long time. This team means a lot to me.”
“I have people that I can rely on,” Bruna says. “I have real friends. They’ve got my back, you know? They are there for me if I need anything outside the field.”
“So for me, it means much more than a team. It means kind of family, too, you know?”
The Toronto Misfits are a tightly-knit group, a team with members ranging in age from 14 to 34, playing under the umbrella of Touch Football Ontario (called T-FONT for short).
T-FONT governs both men’s and women’s teams as they compete in seven-on-seven games. The number of women’s teams varies from year to year, “from 12 to 15,” says Cannon, with weekend tournaments dotting the summer landscape along with mid-week practices and regular Sunday league games, although the pandemic played its part, of course, in scuttling league games in 2021.
At the end of the season, Nationals were held in Markham, Ontario, over Thanksgiving Weekend.
The Misfits capped their year by reaching the final of the ‘A’ championship, before falling by a score of 14-8 to the Ottawa Pirates.
Although they lost that game and a previous game that would have had them aiming for the ultimate goal, a ‘AA’ championship, all around it was considered something to build on for the the players and the coaches alike.
“To finish in the top-five out of 12 or 15 women’s teams, that’s pretty good,” says Cannon, proudly.
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Anthony Cannon (left) and Damon Allen (right) had plenty of tackle football expertise, but had to learn a different version of the game to become effective touch football coaches (Photo courtesy of Julian Wierzbicki)
Anthony Cannon, a native of Pensacola Fla., played three seasons in the NFL with the Detroit Lions, after his college career at Tulane University ended. He headed north to play a single season with the Toronto Argonauts, in 2011. He’d not previously met Damon Allen, who’d retired in 2007.
The two became connected through a mutual teammate, Jordan Younger, now the defensive backs coach with the Winnipeg Blue Bombers. Allen won a Grey Cup with Younger in 2004, with Toronto. Cannon then played with Younger in 2011. Once introduced to each other, they became fast friends and found they could help each other in teaching football to young players.
Their first foray into coaching women’s football, however, was short and very much not sweet.
“We were new to coaching women’s football,” says Cannon of the experience. “We were new to T-FONT. We were new to it all.”
“Our first tournament didn’t go too well,” he says, sheepishly. “Kinda got our butts kicked.”
Right after that tournament, Allen had an idea to set things in motion in what he thought would constitute a better direction for that team, called One Nation. The team should appoint some captains, he declared, and they could be the go-betweens to communicate with the coaches.
Their first communication ended up being their last as well.
“A few days later,” Allen says, laughing, “the captains came and said, ‘We want to move on without you guys as coaches.’” More laughing.
“We had a couple of players that that didn’t want to leave us,” remembers Cannon. “So we say, ‘You know, we’ll go start our own team. Yeah, no problem.’ We had to build from the ground up.”
“That’s why we named the team ‘The Misfits’ because we were kind of like the rejects at the time.”
Elvina D’Souza was there when Cannon and Allen were dumped by One Nation.
Now the Toronto Misfits manager, the 32-year-old is also the team’s starting centre and offensive captain, joining the team in its second season.
D’Souza says that Cannon and Allen brought a tackle football knowledge with them to a very different type of football when they took over as One Nation’s coaches. It was apparent to her that the newbies would need to learn and to adjust; to tailor their knowledge to the style and flow of the touch game.
“It’s still the game of football but now we’re teaching young ladies. There’s really no difference.”
Damon Allen on coaching women’s touch football
“That, I think, was the biggest challenge for them,” says D’Souza, “because you’re dealing with women who have played touch football for a very long time versus guys who have played tackle.
“I had enough respect for them to know that they would get it,” she says of the coaching ouster, after one weekend. “I guess some people didn’t.”
When The Misfits were formed, D’Souza stayed with One Nation, she says, not because she had any problems with Cannon and Allen, but because she felt an obligation to a group of women she’d played with for years. “The Misfits had to basically find just anybody off the street to make seven,” she remembers.
Cannon stayed in D’Souza’s ear, though, asking her to join up with his new team. She finally relented and has not regretted the decision. She raves about Cannon’s coaching style.
“He is all in the details,” she says. “He’s obsessed.”
“He just helped me so much with my footwork and knowledge and football I.Q. No one ever taught me that kind of stuff before. He treats us like athletes and he does the same for the guys as he does for the girls.”
That’s something that is confirmed in an answer Cannon gives when he’s asked about how he sees his coaching philosophy.
“I’m gonna teach you the proper way to run a slant, no matter what,” he says. “With professional players, high school players. I’m going to treat them all the same when it comes to how we prepare for the game.
“It’s still the game of football but now we’re teaching young ladies,” echoes Allen. “There’s really no difference.”
If Cannon and Allen’s lack of a full understanding of touch football initially led them to struggling with the first women’s team they coached, D’Souza now believes the Misfits have an edge because of the coaches’ professional football background.
Cannon, especially, she notes, brings a demanding, full accountability mentality to the team and in treating the athletes no differently than he would a CFL or NFL player, has helped provide The Misfits with a kind of litmus test that ultimately weeds the garden for the squad.
“It separates who’s going to be loyal to the team and who’s just there, you know, for the ride or for their own personal benefits,” D’Souza says. “I think that’s what makes us a family is understanding that team mentality over the individual.”
“I love both of them,” says Bruna, fondly. “They are great coaches and they have so much knowledge that sometimes it blows my mind how much they know about football. And how good they are to putting forward that knowledge.”
“Anthony has been a great coach for me in the team and outside too,” Bruna adds.
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CFL Hall of Famer Damon Allen has been able to share a wealth of knowledge about the game with his players on The Misfits, including Ellen Bruna, seen here (Photo courtesy Julian Wierzbicki)
Filmmaker Julian Wierzbicki explains what he finds so magnetic about the Misfits and why he’d like to feature the team in a documentary series.
“When you get to know these the players on the team,” he says, “they all have a story and they all have a ‘why,’ right? Why they started and why they continue.”
Take Ellen Bruna’s ‘why’ for example.
Playing both sides of the ball as a defensive back and as a receiver, Bruna has become what Cannon calls “the best women’s football player in Canada. Maybe the world.”
Her journey to star player status with The Misfits comes with a backstory of determination and daring and with a stroke of good luck for both she and the team.
She and her husband Gabriel came to Canada, in part, to escape the violence that was evident in Manaus, Brazil, a city that she describes as being located “in the middle of the Amazon Forest.”
Bruna and Gabriel had decided to run a grocery store in Manaus but the experience was not a good one, leading the family to think about different horizons.
“We had it open for about four months,” says Bruna of the store. “And we got robbed four times. That’s actually the main reason why I came to Canada.”
It so happened that Gabriel’s father, Flavio, was already in Canada as a student, learning to speak English. He invited his son to join him and to bring along Gabriel’s mom, Lourdes. Ellen was to follow, if Gabriel liked Toronto. He did and Bruna joined him, a couple of months later, in 2017.
Bruna spoke no English when she arrived in Canada and that made things difficult for her at first. An accomplished flag football player in Brazil, she wanted to continue to play the game she loved and was steered to a tryout for a good, established team. Things didn’t go so well there, mostly because of the language barrier but also because Bruna hadn’t played a down of football in six months.
Flag football is fairly big in Brazil, actually and Bruna was already an accomplished player in a nation that ranks top-10 in the world in women’s flag. She’d already played the game for three years when she arrived in Canada and had sharp skills along with a good knowledge of the game.
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However, her potential new coach assumed she was a beginner. It was suggested that maybe she ought to try to land a position with a new team that was just starting up, called The Misfits.
Good fortune, that was, for both Bruna and the team as they’ve become a perfect fit for each other.
Taking English lessons was one thing, Bruna says. Actually needing to speak it is another thing and that is part of the reason she’s so thankful for her teammates and coaches with The Misfits.
Bruna says that Brazilian communities abroad are tight-knit and that can lead to a definite lack of using the English language, when fluent Portuguese is much handier.
The necessity of learning to communicate with her teammates was crucial, says Bruna, as were the weekend tournament trips to places like Kingston and Belleville, Ont. With a lack of opportunity to fall back on Portuguese both with the team and within those communities, Bruna needed to lean hard into using the new language she was endeavouring to learn.
“We would go on a Friday and come back on a Monday or something like that,” she says. “So that would be three, four days for me only speaking English because I’m the only Brazilian. I was the only Brazilian, at that time, on the team. So I had to speak English.
“To be in that position forced me to practice it more. And I liked it because otherwise I would just stay home and (be) speaking Portuguese all the time with my family, my husband and my friends.”
It was on the football field where Bruna started to feel like she was really cracking the code of her new language. At first, she couldn’t understand the terminology that players and coaches were tossing around. Eventually, though, the switch was flipped.
“After a while I could understand everything,” she says. “That got me to realize how much they helped me with my English.”
When she’s not practising or playing games with The Misfits, Bruna works at her insulation and drywall prep job for a construction company. And with a diploma in marketing from Seneca College, she puts those skills to work in assisting Cannon in spreading the word about his coaching services.
You could say that football served as an essential common denominator that helped Bruna in assimilating to her new life in Canada. For that, she is thankful for the sport and for her teammates, who welcomed her with open arms during a difficult adjustment period.
“They’re always there” she says, gratefully.
Asked if she would like to one day play on the world stage for her adopted country, Bruna answers warmly.
“It’d be like a dream coming true.”
***
As they came together as a team, The Misfits found that they had a bond that extended beyond the confines of the gridiron (Photo courtesy of Julian Wierzbicki)
Seventeen-year-old Sloane Lucyk feels the same vibe that Bruna feels with the Misfits, the feeling that the team provides more than just a chance to compete as an athlete.
The second-year player — Allen calls her “the franchise quarterback” — feels she’s found a home with the Misfits.
“Everyone’s just very supportive and very kind,” Lucyk says, thoughtfully. “I tend to get very down on myself, sometimes and they’re always picking everyone up. Positive energy. I like the drive that everyone has but we’re still very connected. I love everyone, they’re like family.”
It’s that kind of emotional tug that has drawn Wierzbicki into The Misfits’ orbit, after re-connecting with Cannon and Allen after a previous TV project he’d been working on with them fell by the wayside. Interested in perhaps doing something new with the duo, Wierzbicki was informed that the ex-pros were now coaching a women’s touch football team, and he was intrigued.
He speaks passionately about wanting to get the financial backing that would allow him to produce a documentary series about a group of people he has grown to know well and about the stories they all can tell.
After shooting some shorter pieces known as “sizzles” (designed to entice backers into funding a full documentary project) and conducting interviews with the players, he is enthralled. “Just great story after great story,” he says.
Wierzbicki remembers hearing that a new player had joined the team, and that she sat alone at the first practice, unsure of how to interact with the others. He says that’s when the rest of the team members all picked up their stuff and walked over to her, to join her.
“That’s emblematic of what the team is,” Wierzbicki says. “‘You’re a Misfit. You’re one of us. We all stick together.’”
He tells another story, too. Of a player who admitted to him during an interview that she’d contemplated suicide.
“She says, flat out, ‘The Misfits saved my life.’ Damon was there. He was like, ‘Whoa.’ She just opened right up about it and he didn’t even know.”
***
“I’m really a helpmate for him,” says Allen, impishly, of his role with the Misfits. “Anthony Cannon is the foundation. My job is really the quarterback position.”
The two former pros stay very busy with football. Outside of coaching the Misfits, Cannon is the linebackers coach with Wilfrid Laurier University and the defensive coordinator for Bill Carruthers High School, in Markham. And he operates his own company called Elite Football Development.
Allen runs a quarterback school call D9QB Academy, based in California. He talks about ‘paying it forward’ as being a driving force behind his desire to teach the game. “I’m under the mindset about giving back, teaching the next generation,” he says.
He realizes he is getting something out of the process as well, a kind of confirmation of what his lessons can accomplish. It’s true, he says, with The Misfits.
“It is an amazing story,” Allen says. “Where we started, to where we are today. The girls are committed, we have some talented girls who continue to grow. I guess it confirms that your teachings are fundamentally sound because you see someone growing in becoming a really good player, within a four-year span.”
Beyond the strategies, beyond the touchdown passes and the wins, Allen knows that his bond with The Misfits can be surprising.
“It brings a variety of different things that sometimes you don’t think you’ll get out of a situation just by sharing the game of football,” he says.
For Cannon, teaching the Xs and Os is the main thing, but there is also a very personal motivating force behind his dedication to the Misfits.
His mother, Alice, passed away at the age of 57 after battling cancer. That was in 2017, the same year Cannon and Allen were fired by their first women’s touch football team. The same year they decided to form a new team. Alice played a part in that and still does, Cannon says.
“Every woman on this team, you know, to me, there’s a piece of my mom,” he says. “I look at them as a reflection of my mother a little bit.”
That may partly be because Alice, Cannon says, was a great athlete herself. But there’s more to it than that.
“I look at them as a reflection of my mother a little bit, because I know that they’ll all be mothers one day, eventually and they’ll have kids. And that’s something that their kids can can be proud of. That mommy played football.”
Alice, says Cannon, was someone who encouraged her son to help in growing the hearts and minds of young athletes. That he was doing so with female football players delighted her.
“When she passed, I kind of made a point to make her proud in that regard,” says Cannon. “Because I knew how excited she was about it even in the midst of what she was going through. She was so excited.”
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Elvina D'Souza jumped over to The Misfits because she knew that her coaches, Damon Allen and Anthony Cannon, would had so much to offer (Photo courtesy of Julian Wierzbicki)
Next year, The Misfits will try to do better than their spot in the finals of the ‘A’ championship. Once again they’ll aim for the top of the heap, which would be to be crowned ‘AA’ champions.
It won’t be easy, it never is. Especially with The Misfits going from “anyone off the street to make seven” to more of a force to be reckoned with.
“We do have a target on our back,” says team captain D’Souza. “People don’t want to see us succeed because they know we have all the tools to do so.” But, she says, “It’s just a matter of time.”
Cannon and Allen will continue to recruit and to teach players who can get them over the top, building around the core of veterans and emerging young stars they already have.
And the two coaches, at first perplexed by the world of women’s touch football and how their pro football sensibilities could fit in will, undoubtedly, grow a little more themselves.
“Man, it’s rewarding,” says Cannon. “You know, I’m proud of every time we go out there and what we accomplish.
“They gave me a plaque, in 2019, that said, “Coach of the Century,” he chuckles. “They made me coach of the century.”
Pretty good for a guy that got fired from his first gig after just one weekend.
