Arden Zwelling
CFL.ca
The story begins in June, 1996.
It’s wet in Hamilton. 123 millimetres of rain in the month wet — the beginning of the end of a spring season that would go down as the city’s rainiest in history.
Torrential weather or not, the Hamilton Tiger-Cats’ training camp went on as planned. Under head coach Don Sutherland the franchise was looking to build on its 8-10 record from 1995 and searching for its first Grey Cup in ten years.
Kyle Walters and Dwayne Cameron both entered that soggy training camp as rookies by way of humble Guelph — an unassuming city of just over 100,000 in southern Ontario.
Cameron was a Guelph native who played high school football in his home town while Walters was fresh off a four-year stint playing defensive back at Guelph University where he won two Yates Cups with the Gryphons. Naturally, the Tiger-Cats chose to make the two roommates.
Walters made the team as a safety and went on to play six years with Hamilton, winning a Grey Cup in 1999 — the only Grey Cup the team has won in the last 23 years. Cameron didn’t make the team and returned to Guelph where he coached at St. James High School and eventually landed a job as strength and conditioning coach for the NBA’s Toronto Raptors in 2002.
Two years later in Waterloo — when a defensive backs coaching job at Wilfrid Laurier University opened up — the two crossed paths again. Both men interviewed for the job, Cameron looking to further his coaching career and Walters trying to stay in the game after his playing days were finished. This time Cameron got the job, while Walters returned to Guelph. Walters returned his alma mater to be the defensive coordinator for the Gryphons, eventually taking over as head coach in 2006.
Now, 14 years after that rainy June training camp in Hamilton first brought together the two young Guelph products, Cameron and Walters both enter the CFL in the same season — Cameron as an assistant special teams and defensive coach in Hamilton and Walters as the special teams coordinator with the Winnipeg Blue Bombers.
Not that there’s any rivalry here. The two rookie CFL coaches can’t find enough nice things to say about each other.
“There’s certainly been some similar paths between us,” Cameron said from Hamilton where he was putting the Tiger-Cats through their paces in preparation for their season opener July 2 against — guess who — Walters’ Blue Bombers.
“He was a good player. He got the job back then in Hamilton and had a good CFL career so I guess he got me there.”
The road to coaching in the CFL runs directly through Guelph, it seems. And while the paths of both men have obviously overlapped, their methods of entering the CFL are night and day.
For Walters, the first step to coaching in the pros was picking up the phone.
“When Coach LaPolice contacted me, I thought he might have been inquiring about the draft and some of the kids at Guelph who were draft eligible,” Walters said of the call he received from Winnipeg Blue Bombers head coach Paul LaPolice in late February.
Quite the contrary. In fact, LaPolice was calling to inquire about Walters’ willingness to leave the Gryphons to coach special teams in Winnipeg.
Walters didn’t take much convincing.
“An opportunity like this doesn’t come by very often,” Walters said. “I’m always looking for new challenges and different things. This seemed like a really unique opportunity.”
Cameron, on the other hand, travelled a bit further for his CFL gig.
On the advice of Dennis McPhee — the head coach of Waterloo University’s football program — Cameron loaded up his Mazda this January and drove 2000 kilometres to the Senior Bowl in Mobile, Alabama.
Much like Canada’s East-West bowl between the best players the CIS has to offer, the Senior Bowl features the best NFL draft prospects from the American college ranks. It attracts a bevy of coaches, executives and scouts from both sides of the border.
“There were no guarantees. There was nothing set up — there were no meetings scheduled with anybody. It was essentially just go down there and meet people,” Cameron said.
It was at the Senior Bowl that Cameron struck up a conversation with Marcel Bellefeuille, head coach of the Hamilton Tiger-Cats and a former CIS coach himself at the University of Ottawa.
Cameron and Bellefeuille connected again at the CFL’s Evaluation Camp in March and shortly thereafter Cameron signed on with the Tiger-Cats as an assistant coach. Not a bad outcome from a 40 hour roundtrip to Alabama.
“I wanted to make a move upward and I really wanted to turn coaching into a career,” Cameron said. “Marcel was very gracious — he gave me plenty of time in Alabama and then again back in Ontario. Obviously these opportunities in the CFL are very limited so I feel very fortunate.”
Happy to be in the CFL both men know they are leaving exceptional university programs behind to coach in the pros.
Walters coached a hard luck Gryphons team in 2009 that saw four of their five losses decided by seven points or less. Despite losing to the Western Mustangs in the OUA quarterfinals, the team’s offence ranked fourth in the country, ahead of eventual Vanier Cup champion Queen’s.
Cameron also coached a team ranked fourth in the nation that lost to the Mustangs in the OUA playoffs — a Laurier defence that held opposing teams to just 17 points per game in 2009. Taurean Allen and Chima Ihekwoaba — two of Cameron’s defensive products at Laurier — have also gone on to the pros as players this year with the Calgary Stampeders and Detroit Lions, respectively.
“I left an outstanding program at Laurier with tremendous coaching right from the top,” Cameron said. “Our defensive coordinator Ron VanMoerkerke has to be the best CIS coach who is not a head coach at this point in time. It’s an incredible program.”
Walters and Cameron have been part of a resurgence for the CIS in the past ten years— an era that has seen both the competition within the league and the quality of athletes it produces reach higher levels.
The East West bowl — introduced in 2003 — annually attracts the nation’s best college players and 36 of the 47 players selected in the 2010 CFL draft were from Canadian schools.
However, coaches with roots in the NCAA still outnumber coaches from the CIS two to one in the CFL and the overwhelming majority of coaches in Canada’s league are American.
“I don’t think anything is owed to you whether you’re Canadian or American from a coaching standpoint,” Walters said. “The goal is just to win and get the best staff together — that’s just the way it is.”
Across all professional sports, head coaches traditionally fill out their staffs with coaches they have worked with before and are familiar with. With six of the eight head coaches in the CFL being American, Canadians who cut their teeth in the CIS are already behind the eight ball.
But according to both Cameron and Walters, the opportunities are out there — Canadians just have to seize them.
“I think that it’s happening — both Kyle and myself are direct examples of that,” Cameron said of CIS coaches breaking into the pros. “If you’re committed to it the opportunity is there and I feel that wholeheartedly because of where I am today.”
Of course, this suggests another problem — a lack of commitment
or willingness to make the step up for Canadian coaches. Neither Walters nor Cameron could identify any specific barriers preventing Canadian coaches from getting involved in the pros — it seems as if fewer young Canadians involved in football see it as an option.
Both coaches suggested teams should begin an internship program for young Canadian coaches, specifically targeting intelligent players from the CIS whose playing days are numbered.
“That’s a great way to get CIS people involved in the CFL,” Walters said. “If you can identify kids in their senior years of University who might not be moving on to play anymore but want to stay involved in the game, it would be positive to have them around a professional team for some time to learn.”
Starting your career in Guelph, it seems, doesn’t hurt either.
