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The head coach of the Winnipeg Rifles junior football team is in a shoot-first, ask-questions-later mood after its practice field was torn up by a vehicle on Tuesday night.

Geordie Wilson went to Maple Grove Park to water the grass on Wednesday morning and discovered that a chain to access the field had been cut and a vehicle did a number of doughnuts in the middle of it.

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“Put it this way, if I’d have caught the guy, I would’ve beat the f—— s— out of him. I’m not kidding,” Wilson said. “It just irritates the hell out of me to think how much time, money and effort that people put in to fixing the field so that we have a decent facility to practice at. Guys spend all that time, and then some little puke does something like that? It’s just terrible. It’s just senseless.”

Wilson said his team and the St. Vital Mustangs minor football program spent as much as $20,000 seeding and putting down topsoil last year in an effort to level it out and make it available for themselves and other local football programs.

The grass has begun growing in this dry summer, but was gouged by tire marks at centre-field thanks in part to Monday night’s rainstorm.

“It’s pretty disheartening, really. Don’t know whether somebody was just wanting to get back at either the Rifles program or the Mustangs program, but they’ve set us back financially and from a program standpoint. They’ve done a good job of upsetting us and making it difficult for us to run our programs, for sure,” St. Vital Mustangs president Craig Bachynski said.

He wasn’t sure of a possible replacement cost.

“It’s more of the time limit now, because it’s right in the middle of our season and it’s ripped up.”