Stephen Lewis Lynx.
The Stephen Lewis Lynx, pictured here bowling against the Lincoln Alexander squad in playoff action, will play Brampton’s St. Augustine for the Peel high school cricket championship tomorrow.
File photo
It’s as improbable as Canada, overnight, becoming a world cricket power.Yet that's what the Stephen Lewis Lynx cricket program has achieved.
In only its second year of Region of Peel Secondary School Athletic Association competition, the senior boys’ tier 1 team will be crowned Peel champion if it beats Brampton’s St. Augustine in tomorrow’s final.
The match will be played at The Woodlands Secondary School, at 4:15 p.m. (no spectators allowed).
“We’ve got a very good chance if every player plays his role and doesn’t try to be a hero,” said Lynx head coach Jesse Sturgeon.
The first-year coach, along with assistant Ashoak Grewal, had 80 boys turn out for intramural play from which two squads — junior and senior, 18 players in total — were chosen.
That’s an impressive number for a program in its second year. The fight for roster spots on the senior squad was so fierce, four players from the previous year were cut.
But even Sturgeon and Grewal probably didn’t expect the team to do so well.
While the juniors finished the season at 2-5 and missed the playoffs, the seniors were the class of the South Division, going 6-0-1.
Sturgeon points to superlative bowling and strong opening batting as the Lynx’s strength. Led by captain and all-rounder Ammar Hakim, the bowlers held the opposition to 331 runs, while their batsmen, anchored by openers Usama Ahmed and Qazah Shehzad, put up 421 in reply.
Still, the Lynx had to overcome a scare in the playoffs. Against Lincoln Alexander in quarter-final play, the final score was 64-64, and a tie-breaker was needed before Stephen Lewis was declared the winner.
In the semi-finals, the Lynx squeaked by T.L. Kennedy 54-51. In that match, Stephen Lewis stared at defeat when it lost three wickets in only three overs for a paltry 13 runs. Only a determined stand by Shehzad, who scored 17, aided by Khurram Masud later in the game, prevented the Churchill Meadows school from going down to defeat.
“We came out a bit flat, but we were really resilient,” Sturgeon said.
The Lynx will have to bring their A game to the final against St. Augustine.
“We’ve never played them so I can only go by what I’ve heard. And what I hear is that they’re a good, solid team,” said Sturgeon.
The Brampton school went 5-1 on the season, and advanced to the final by romping over Father Goetz 46-38 and John Fraser 55-39.
The winner of tomorrow's match advances to play the Toronto champion next Tuesday at Humber College.
jchin@mississauga.net