Generals win PGFL championship
November 17, 2025, 10:51 am
Brett Bochek
The Moosomin Generals girls team are Prairie Girls Football League champions after defeating the Yorkton Lady Gridders in the PGFL championship game in Yorkton on Sunday, November 9.
It wasn’t very long ago that girls football in Moosomin and the PGFL didn’t exist, with Moosomin forming the very first girls team and spurring the creation of the Prairie Girls Football League.
“We started the Generals 15 seasons ago with Jason Schenn and the other founders, and then around 2018 there were a few girls hanging around and wanting to play but they didn’t want to play with the boys,” says girls team head coach Dexter Mondor.
“Jason Schenn said ‘Hey, should we start a girls program?’ and I said ‘why not?’ So we started a girls program I believe it was the spring of 2018.
“We were the first minor football girls program in the province. I think we had a roster of 32 players. Doing that gave Melville a boost to get going and they started a team about two weeks later.
“The first year we just scrimmaged with each other, back and forth. Yorkton joined that fall and then the next season Regina joined, and since then Estevan has joined. The Prairie Girls Football League officially took off in 2021.
“The first year after Covid, we were fortunate enough to be the Number 1 seed that year and host the championship on our home field against Yorkton and we won. We were the very first champions and the league back then was nine-a-side because teams had large rosters, but in the last couple of years we’ve switched to six-a-side because of dwindling numbers throughout all programs and then this year we started out slow.
“Last year we had no Grade 12s. They were all Grade 9s, 10s, and 11s, and we were on the borderline if we were going to have a team. With six-a-side you obviously need six players, and we started the season with nine players. We played our first game in Melville and got beat by 20 points, players were exhausted because they had to go both ways and the next game Yorkton came to town and beat us 50-12.
“We said to the girls ‘If we are going to keep doing this, we need players.’ That was a turning point in the season. Yesterday we had a roster direct of 13 players and 15 on the roster, one out with a concussion and one out with a broken hand. We basically doubled our team.”
Dexter says the girls who play on the Generals are from around Southeast Saskatchewan and Southwest Manitoba.
“Some of are from Moosomin, my daughter’s from Wawota, there is another one from Wawota, and we have players from Elkhorn. There’s four from Elkhorn and Swan River. They had a team but they were losing numbers so they actually folded, forfeited the rest of the season, but they did that before the roster deadline so we gained a player from them, who actually played with us when we won our first championship and her dad coaches with us. They made the commitment of travelling from Swan River twice a week for practices, which is phenomenal.
“This year we drew as far as Swan River, Moosomin, Elkhorn, Wawota and in the past we’ve had girls as far south as Carievale.
“Gaining the players helps. All the girls are buying in and being committed in playing like a team. We have no selfish players which is huge because with football you can’t have a superstar who can run lots of yards, score lots of touchdowns, make all the tackles. They all understood it was a team first mentality.
“We also told them that when we had nine or 10 players, five of those were Grade 12s, and we told those girls that there may not be a team next year—if we don’t have the numbers, we don’t have team. That made them buy in extra hard and say ‘This is potentially the last year for the Moosomin Generals girls team, why not go out with a bang and win a championship.’ ”
Mondor says he has been involved in football since he was a kid, and this will be his last year coaching for the Generals.
“I grew up in Medicine Hat, I played football out there, I started coaching Pee Wee football when I was 18 years old. I moved to Wawota in 2004, continued coaching a bit of track and field and I’d seen an ad in the paper talking about the Moosomin Generals and they just fired up, they did some exhibition stuff in the fall.
I think they played an exhibition game against Virden and it said at the end ‘If there is anybody out there that wants to help and get involved, send me an e-mail’ so right away I sent Jason an e-mail, told him who I was, what I did, how much experience I had. Once I hit send and before I turned my computer off I had a reply ‘When can we meet.’ And I have been with this program for 15 years.
“I never had kids playing then, my oldest graduated two years ago so she would have been the first that played. My youngest daughter, this was her last game.
That’s one of the reasons why I’m done with the girls team this year, but doing two teams is tough, and then my boy, this was his first year with the boys team. The team I started with I’ve coached for 14 years without having a kid on the team.
“It’s just because I grew up with the sport and I love the sport and I know what it does for kids. It’s the ultimate team sport, people say that all the time. There is a position for everybody. It’s a family, it’s just a different sport and kids need this type of sport.”
Dexter says what football teaches young people is extremely valuable.
“Discipline, work ethic, effort, and team work. Nothing against society nowadays, but humans have got a little bit softer and when they come to the program with the Generals, we are not a school affiliated team. I’m not saying we are overly hard on them, but we expect effort and competitiveness, we expect them to try, we want them to be there, we hold them accountable and the kids aren’t used to that. They actually thrive on it.
“It’s all about family, it’s not about me as a coach wanting to win a championship, it’s about everybody coming together. Even in Yorkton during the championship game, our stands were louder than Yorkton’s team, I bet you we had a hundred people drive up to watch the game. We had parents in Carlyle whose kid plays on the high school team and has no affiliation with the girls team, they came up to support, we had half a dozen players from the boys team there cheering them on. Because they have more snow in Yorkton, they were writing Generals in the snow on the side of the hill. It was a cool atmosphere.
“Football’s my only sport and I don’t see that portrayed in baseball, and soccer, and hockey. The family atmosphere is something to be cherished in football.”
The Generals didn’t start the season with a bang, but Mondor says they worked hard to end it that way.
“It was after week two when we lost pretty heavily to Yorkton . . . I don’t know if they had their own meeting with the minds or they just all decided collectively ‘These guys are serious, we got to make it work this year,’ but things just starting clicking. Everybody bought in, all the prep and practice, the game film, everybody was learning multiple positions on offense and defense just in case, and like I said, there were no selfish players.
“A player like Madison Judd who was our work horse on offense, after that point she was averaging seven touchdowns a game where some girls on offense wouldn’t score touchdowns, but they were fine with that because it was about the wins and the team doing well. Same thing on defense, you would have one or two girls running away with all the tackles, but they were fine with that because it was about the team.”
Mondor says it felt great to see the girls win the championship.
“It felt good, because I wanted to see all the hard work produce something, especially for playoffs. We did extra practices, studied both opponents and that helped, just by looking at the scoreboard. We went to Melville, beat them 50-8 and then the championship. We go to Yorkton and beat them 28-6 and we hadn’t beat Yorkton since we won the very first league championship in 2021, and we had beat Melville once this regular season, but overall Melville beat us more than we beat them.
“It was great to see those girls be that committed, and even the younger players that didn’t see much playing time during the championship game, they were on the sidelines probably cheering the loudest for their teammates when there are big plays.
“And me knowing it was my last game with that team, it is awesome go out on a win, especially a championship—and to see seven Grade 12s win their last game because football is the type of sport that you don’t decide when your done, it does. Ninety-nine per cent of the kids that played high school football do not go on to the next level. There’s no rec football, there’s no senior football league in Moosomin or Wawota, it’s not like were you can go play rec hockey or slow-pitch. Once you’re done, you’re done.
“It sucks seeing kids lose there last Grade 12 game because I know what that’s like, they’re done and they’ve invested all that time and effort, their parents have supported them, and so when you can win that championship, especially against a big rival like Yorkton and do it on their field, that’s something more special.”
Mondor says the girls were nervous going into the championship game.
“There were a lot of nerves, the girls were definitely nervous before the game, which is to be expected because they want to win, the coaches want to win, the other team wants to win, the fans want to win.
“But as we went on offense, they stopped us fairly quick, but then went back on defense and we stopped them right away, and then that’s when we started chipping away and driving the ball down the field. You can just feel that momentum and that feeling that this is reality, and the girls didn’t quit, they kept the pedal to the floor and just kept doing their thing and it was awesome to watch.
“Young athletes excel when they are out there in front of you because all we can do as coaches is call the plays, but then it comes down to a bunch of teenage girls out there having fun, executing, and enjoying what they are doing.
“It’s awesome, that’s the best way to put it is it’s awesome. I’m the head coach of the girls and the boys. We’ve won four championships between the two teams in the last five years. That’s something tough to do in any sport, but extremely tough to do in football.
“It’s great to see these kids buying into what we are doing and being committed towards a common goal. Everybody’s there for the right reason. It’s not about us, it’s not about the players, it’s about being competitive, working hard, and when you do that the right outcomes usually happen, and that goes for anything in life, not just football, but work and school and everything else.”
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