The Mount Royal University men's soccer program is no stranger to winning. During its time in the Alberta Colleges Athletic Conference (ACAC) division of the Canadian Collegiate Athletics Association (CCAA), the team has hoisted the championship banner 12 times.
Mount Royal alumnus, Sean Friesen, was lucky enough to be a part of the celebration three of his four years with the school.
Friesen joined the Cougars as an 18-year-old rookie from Saskatchewan in 1996.
"I guess [Brian Ellis] saw something in me, I don't know what that was at the time but he saw something," Friesen said on first being recruited to Mount Royal while playing for a team in Saskatchewan.
Ellis worked as head coach for the Mount Royal men's soccer team throughout Friesen's entire degree, earning ACAC coach of the year three times, the first in 1996.
"I didn't jump in right away to playing. I sat the bench a lot, I had to pay my dues," Friesen said. "[Ellis] taught me to be patient but also work hard."
To this day, Friesen remembers Ellis' positive reinforcement and the effects of having such a great mentor during those years.
Before Friesen arrived, the Cougars had won the championship every single year since the 1990-91 season. He could sense the pressure to keep
up the tradition and protect the program's reputation from his first step onto campus.
It was common to see the ACAC and the CCAA rankings posted on the director's door every week, always reminding the men that their team was sitting top five, sometimes top three in the nation.
"You could definitely feel that this was a program that demanded excellence," Friesen said - and excellence is what they achieved. The team managed to take home the ACAC championship for the 1996-97 season after beating Grant MacEwan University 2-0. This was the school's seventh ACAC win in a row.
"Personally I had never played with players of that quality. There were five or six guys who were the best players I'd ever seen," Friesen reminisced. "I was a rookie at the time so I wasn't really a focal point of the team, but certainly I remember being confident going into every game."
The win booked them another ticket to the CCAA nationals hosted by the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ont. where Mount Royal was returning as silver medalists from the previous year. The team medalled after defeating Collège Ahuntsic from Quebec 3-1 in the bronze medal final.
The Cougars continued their success for the remainder of Friesen's varsity soccer career. In his four years, they won the ACAC championship three times. Once in his rookie season, once the following year, and the third in his fourth and final season. The team even managed to take home the CCAA gold medal in the 1997/98 year.
Twenty-five years later, Friesen looks back at his time with Mount Royal and remembers the good times. He remembers the highs of winning and the lows that come with losses, but above all else he remembers how much he grew not only as an athlete and an academic, but as a person.
"I think a lot of these new players now have got more skill than we ever had. They just need to keep working hard and if they keep working hard good things are going to happen," Friesen said.
For the current Cougars, his advice is to trust the process and take their time to enjoy these moments before it's too late. "I think you'll look back on this time that you had very fondly, I certainly do and it was the best time of my life."
Once a cougar, always a Cougar, and Mount Royal is proud to be home to alumni like Sean Friesen.
