After back-to-back sub-.500 seasons, the Lycoming College football team will be crossing the border to try and improve its skills against an international opponent. On Sunday, May 21 at 1 p.m., the Warriors will take on the Vanier College Cheetahs of Montreal in an exhibition football game.

“The NCAA has a foreign tour exception which basically says that you can go out of the country and play a game, but it has to be outside of your normal academic calendar,” said Lycoming football coach Mike Clark. “When we started to look at it, what a lot of Division III football programs do is that they do it at the end of the year. I knew some of our competitors that did it.

“So I made a phone call to the head coach at Vanier, I knew they had played Albright,” said Clark. I assumed that they were going to play Albright again this spring and Peter (Chryssomalis), their head coach, told me that was not the case and he would be willing to play us. I knew the rule existed, made a couple phone calls and here we are.”

The Lycoming College men’s basketball team made a similar trip to Toronto over the winter break and Clark wanted the football team to have the same experience. While NCAA teams can only travel out of the United States every three years to play an exhibition game, Vanier can host teams every year and has done so for the last few years and has played teams like Albright and McDaniel.

Lycoming will practice on Thursday, May 18 and then bus up to Watertown, New York for the night. They will head for Montreal the next morning and make it into the city by noon. About 80 players will attend, excluding incoming freshmen and seniors.

“I think this is a great opportunity for our team to improve for the fall and unfortunately, as much as I love some of our seniors, they’re obviously not going to come back and play,” said Clark, who would like to make this trip every three years. “Do I think those guys would love to go to Canada? Yes. I’m not sure how many of those guys would want to suit up after not having practice in months. Honestly, we’re looking at this as an opportunity to improve… We need to use this as an opportunity for us to improve for 2017.”

Other than the advantage of going to a foreign city, Lycoming gains 10 extra padded practices to prepare for the exhibition. Clark will use a couple practices for his team to get accustomed to Canadian football rules, like having three downs to get a first down instead of four, different types of pre-snap motion and a much larger field (Canadian fields are 150 yards long with end zones being 20 yards deep). Currently the Warriors are in the midst of their normal strength and conditioning period. The NCAA allows 16 of these days plus the additional 10 practices.

Though Clark and his coaches are going to take the team sightseeing and allow them to experience a different culture, this will be a great opportunity to get a real jump start on the 2017 season.

“The value is two-fold. One is that we actually have an opportunity to practice and improve fundamentally as a football team and I don’t think that will be minimized. I do think the fundamental stuff, the team-building stuff, us actually improving as football players has tremendous value.

“But I also think that there’s a non-football specific thing to this. I’ve been to Puerto Rico, but a lot of our players maybe never been out of Pennsylvania, so now we’re going to take our kids to a place that will be different than America,” said Clark. “From a cultural standpoint, different than being in Philadelphia or New York City or Baltimore or some of the bigger cities that kids have been to. It’ll be a lot different culturally for some of our kids, it’ll be something that they’ve never down and potentially something that these guys never do again.”

This will also be a great experience for Clark and his assistants to see what they have in some of the younger players that maybe didn’t get an opportunity to get much playing time as the team loses 18 seniors, with over 10 being starters including the quarterback, the league’s leading rusher and two All-MAC offensive linemen.

“It’s not a ton but it’s an advantage. It’s an opportunity for the guys here to learn our stuff and do our stuff and improve as football players and maybe show us that they can be the kind of guy to help us win going forward,” Clark said. “Especially after last year, two years ago it was bad, last year it was worse. So the things we’re really trying to focus on is being accountable to each other. Eliminate the things that we can control. We can control our effort. We can control being on time and attention to detail. All the little things.”