HEAD COACH FOCUSED ON PROCESS NOT RESULTS AS VOYAGEURS PREP FOR REGULAR SEASON

CALGARY, BANFF & OLDS – "Winning is everything" UCLA head coach Red Sanders famously quipped in 1950. Seventy-five years later, Macky Singh would respectfully disagree. The head coach of the Portage College Voyageurs knows winning matters in a competitive sport – but how you win (or lose) is much more important (especially during the exhibition season). The process is what matters, even if that's sometimes hard for young, talented athletes to process.

Case in point: this past weekend. The Voyageurs travelled to Calgary to take on Ambrose University on August 22, enjoyed a day of team building in Banff and then stopped in Olds to challenge the Broncos on the way back to Lac La Biche. And while they came away with a split, losing 3-0 to the Lions before besting Olds College 2-1, Singh wasn't interested in the numbers on the scoreboard. Rather, he was focused solely on how his troops were playing and what good and bad habits they might be developing.

"The first game when we played Ambrose, I think they had the mentality that they were going to win the game and in reality, that's kind of why we lost," he said. "We forgot about the process and thought about the result. And that's not what we do. We don't focus on the outcome."

In other words, it's not why they lost that matters; it's how they lost.

"You look at the result and yes, we lost, but that's not here nor there," said Singh. "We lost the game in the first half. We let in a goal in the first minute and in the second half, we let in two goals in the first five minutes, so we were not ready."

When the Voyageurs began the match against Olds the same way, the head coach read them the riot act, not wanting last year's tendency to start slowly to creep into their play once the regular season begins. Again, it was all about the process and in this case, it led to a winning result. Portage played a strong second half and came away with a 2-1 victory. Singh even had the opportunity to give many of his first-year athletes some playing time so see how they fit in.

"It was a good day, and it was a good four exhibition games under our belt the past two weekends," he said.

Finishing the exhibition season with a 2-2 record, the Voyageurs now have 12 days to prepare for when the games really count. Their head coach is optimistic that if they stick to the process, the results will come.

"Now we have two weeks away to get our mindset right," said Singh. "If we do, I think we could be pushing a mid-table kind of situation [in the league] but I don't want to get carried away about that."