MontrealAlouettes.com
MONTREAL – Anyone with sore ankles from leaping off the Alouettes bandwagon following their Week 1 stumble in Calgary must be new to the CFL reality. With an 18-game schedule which spans three seasons from the heat of July to the turning leaves of September and then snow flurries of November, the CFL season is anything but a sprint.
While several CFL teams are breaking in new head coaches this season, the Alouettes count one of the league’s most venerable coaches on their sideline. The long and winding journey that is the CFL season is nothing new to Trestman who knows full-well that Grey Cups aren’t won (or lost) in July.
“We are a new team. We are a new team playing on the road for the first time with more new players than we have ever had before. We aren’t about to relinquish the season,” explained Trestman. “We are in a division that started out 0-4 in Week 1. We’ve got a short week and a lot of challenges ahead.”
Having guided the Alouettes to three of the past four Grey Cup games and a pair of championships, Trestman understands that the 2012 campaign is an embryo and that the canvas of this new season remains a clean one.
“We’ve only got one day of practice and our group must get emotionally invested in this next game,” prescribed Trestman ahead of the Als battle with the division-rival Blue Bombers on Friday night at Percival Molson Stadium. “We`ve got to put it behind us as quickly as we can and we`ve got to focus all of our attention on Winnipeg as quickly as we can.”
The last time a Trestman squad opened the season with a loss on the road was in 2010. The Alouettes survived that July 1 bump in the road in Saskatchewan to finish 12-6 to win the Eastern Division before going on to win the Grey Cup that year.
