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+---- Thread: *The Cedric Theriault Story (/showthread.php?tid=51477)
*The Cedric Theriault Story - tcookie - 05-21-2024
It’s mid-January 2054 in Laval, Quebec, and it’s freezing outside: minus-27 degrees Celsius (about minus-17 degrees Fahrenheit). An 11-year-old Cedric Theriault pulls himself out of a snowbank next to his family’s backyard rink after a particularly hard hit from his 14-year-old brother Jacob. It probably goes without saying, but he’s cold. And he’s angry.
Back on the ice, Cedric yells a vague threat into the crisp night air. “Ouu, tu vas voir Jake! Je suis sérieux!”
…
The Theriaults always had the best outdoor rink in their neighbourhood in Laval. They had a reasonably large back yard, and hockey was kind of a way of life. Maude Theriault, the eldest sibling, was a 16-year-old prodigy on the Hockey Canada radar, already being recruited for NCAA schools. Jacob Theriault was not quite as talented, but an extremely hard worker - and extremely competitive, much like Cedric - and thought to maybe have a future in the QMJHL ahead of him. A professional hockey career seemed unlikely, but with someone who worked that hard, who knew for sure?
They were just following in the footsteps of their mother, Vanessa Theriault, a two-time Olympic champion with the Canadian Women’s National team who played for Canada for six years and in the PWHL for nine before she retired at age 31 and got pregnant with Maude shortly thereafter. She was… a bit of a local celebrity.
So, of course the Theriaults always had the best outdoor rink. They were a hockey family through and through; as soon as it was cold enough for ice to hold, the Theriault rink was ready to go. Almost every night there was some kind of backyard hockey game going on between the kids and their friends.
“They loved it. Hanging out with friends all the time, being outside, being active. It was a lot of work for us as parents to maintain the rink and to have people over as often as we did, but it was totally worth it,” Vanessa reminisces. “Every once in a while it would be a bit of a blowout out there and I’d have to get back on the ice and even things up. Only once in a while!”
“The other kids loved it when she joined us,” Maude says, but clarifies with a laugh: “Jake, Cedric, and I… maybe didn’t like that our mom was the best player on the ice.”
Marc-Antoine Theriault didn’t know how to skate until he was 21 years old. That’s when he met Vanessa; they were students at McGill University. He was a track star, so don’t get it confused - he was quite the athlete himself. He’d watch Vanessa’s games and eventually, as their relationship grew, he’d join her on the ice every once in a while. With natural athletic ability, he picked it up pretty quick. He never picked up a stick, though - he liked watching, but playing hockey wasn’t his thing.
Cedric was a little more Marc-Antoine than Vanessa, at least compared to his siblings. He liked hockey, to be sure. He was exceptionally competitive, and it was a form of readily-available competition. He enjoyed the physicality, and for his age, he was a reasonably good hockey player in his own right.
He just never really liked the cold.
…
Cedric took a couple of strides back on the ice. Snow covered his equipment - it was in his gloves, in his skates, making an uncomfortably cold day even more uncomfortable.
Just as Cedric’s warning left his mouth, Jacob had crossed centre ice with the puck about fifteen feet away from him. Cedric dropped his stick, squared his shoulders, and executed a perfect form tackle that drove his brother right through the same snowbank that Cedric had just climbed out of.
Of course, you can’t do that in hockey. A little ignorant of the sharp blades on each of their feet, the brothers wrestled in the snow, occasionally trying to throw a punch. Maude jumped into the fray herself, attempting to keep her brothers from inflicting too much damage on each other as their friends looked on.
All three Theriault kids left the rink with some bruises that night. Jacob and Cedric each sported black eyes. Vanessa and Marc-Antoine had to shut the kids down for a week. It was a little too far across the line.
“Yeah, that one was a linebacker hit,” Marc-Antoine recalled. “Definitely not legal in hockey! Ten years later we can laugh about it. They’re just super competitive, right? They’ve all done really well for themselves and we’re so proud of them and that competitiveness is a big reason for it. But that night we had to calm them down a little…”
Such is the story of the only time the Theriault backyard rink got a week off in about a ten-year span - from when Maude really started to get into hockey until when Jacob left to try out for the QMJHL’s Drummondville Voltigeurs.
It’s also the story of when everyone realized that Cedric Theriault was a football player, not a hockey player. Although he’d still play with his siblings and friends on the outdoor rink, he never played organized hockey again. But that hit? That was one he would replicate many times over, fortunately wearing cleats instead of skates.
…
In the fall of 2054, Marc-Antoine took all three of his children to the Uteck Bowl game in Laval - a Vanier Cup semifinal match between the RSEQ (Réseau du sport étudiant du Québec) and AUS (Atlantic University Sport) conference champions. The 2054 matchup was between the hometown Laval Rouge-et-Or and the Acadia Axemen. It was the first live football game that the Theriault children had ever been to.
Cedric, who had been playing youth football for a few years now, was clearly the most into the game. “Cedric knew what he was talking about - he was calling out plays and stuff that none of us really understood and he’d do his best to explain… our whole family was big on pretty much everything sports, right, so we knew the game on a casual level. But it was pretty neat hearing how much he knew about the game as it was happening in front of us,” said Marc-Antoine.
Laval was expected to win the game in convincing fashion. They trailed 13-10 at halftime, but scored five unanswered touchdowns in the second half to take a 45-13 lead and would go on to a 48-21 win.
On the way home in the car, Cedric proclaimed, “One day it’ll be me on that field, Dad.”
“And honestly, I completely believed him,” recalls Marc-Antoine. “He was a talented kid, a hard worker - what reason did I have to doubt it?”
…
L’école secondaire de l’Amitié (Amitié High School) didn’t usually let ninth-graders play on the varsity football team.
But head coach Frances Dansereau watched a little kid wearing #11 carving up his defense comprised mostly of seniors in practice, and he couldn’t help but wonder if maybe there was a way he could get an exception for this one.
“The first time he touched the ball, he took a little screen pass, two yards in the backfield, just made this absolutely nasty cut up field. Now he’s one-on-one with Antoine Tardif, our senior middle linebacker, #29, best tackler on the team. This is a guy that was one of the top LB recruits in the country, he played five years at Montreal when he graduated, he got a CFL look. This dude’s a football player, right, and Cedric just makes him eat dirt,” recalls Dansereau.
“He jukes him so bad, Tardif hits the deck and Cedric scores a 70-yard TD and all of a sudden I think the entire school knows who Cedric Theriault is.”
“We figure Tardif just got a little cocky and didn’t respect the ninth-grade kid. He wouldn’t get him again. Then four or five plays later he got ‘em with another spin move and you could just see the steam coming out of Tardif’s ears. He probably wouldn’t have felt so bad if he knew what we do now, but nobody made Antoine Tardif look like that in four years here, so… you know.”
“Cedric had some filling out to do with his body. At first he was just so quick and shifty… he eventually added that strength element to his game and got even better. But you know, freshman year, he was tiny, but he was so hard to hit. He didn’t get hurt because you could never get him clean - and the harder you tried, the worse he’d make you look.”
It took almost a month to get the necessary paperwork filed and approved, so he missed the team’s first three games, but Cedric Theriault became the first freshman in a couple of decades to break Amitié’s rule on ninth-graders with the varsity team. In the five games he did play, Theriault served as the #2 back, primary return man, and a gunner on special teams. He ran for 440 yards and 6 TDs, caught passes for 119 yards and another TD, and led the team with 14 special teams tackles in those five games.
…
Probably the only reason that Cedric Theriault didn’t set Quebec high school records in a whole bunch of different categories is because he couldn’t play every snap. Theriault was taken off return duties early in his second season at Amitié because he was RB1 while lining up in the slot in some passing packages, at free safety defensively, and still occasionally as a gunner on kick coverage teams.
Dansereau didn’t want to lose him on offense or defense, so he used him rather conservatively at both RB and safety. He still ran for 3661 yards and 35 TDs in 24 games in his last three years of high school ball. He caught passes for another 879 yards and 7 TDs, made 11 sacks, intercepted 9 passes (3 of which he returned for touchdowns), and led the team in special teams tackles as a sophomore before he was eventually eased out of the gunner role, too. He only touched the ball on returns 15 times over the final three seasons, used only if Amitié was desperate for a game-changing play in the return game. Three of those 15 touches went for touchdowns.
“It was such a blessing to have a player like that. He did everything and he did it brilliantly. But in a sense it was challenging to use him too because you really have to manage his snaps. He could’ve played every single snap if we would have let him, but you can’t run a kid into the ground like that, you have to think about his future,” recalls Dansereau. “So he probably only played 60-65% of our offensive snaps, 60-65% of our defensive snaps… special teams if we really needed to make something happen.”
Dansereau wasn’t surprised that USports powerhouses like Laval, Calgary, and Montreal came knocking on the door. For his last two seasons at Amitié, Theriault was one of the most highly recruited players in Canada.
“The only thing that surprised me,” says Dansereau, “is that he declined West Virginia.”
West Virginia was the only NCAA school that had been ranked in the top-25 during the 2059 season that offered Theriault a full scholarship, though he had eight offers from the NCAA in total. Cedric’s mind, however, had basically been made up when he was 12 years old.
“I felt like I owed it to everyone to hear them out and keep an open mind,” he says of his recruitment process. “But it was always going to take something crazy to happen to get me out of Laval.”
…
Vincent Choquet had played for Laval for five years back in the 2030s before taking over as head coach in 2058. As much as Canadian football is a passing game, the Laval Rouge-et-Or were a Canadian powerhouse built on a power running game. It had been that way for as long as he could remember.
The Rouge-et-Or had missed the playoffs exactly once since 1999. That was in 2057 - but that had also marked a twelve-year Vanier Cup drought, a lack of success that was unacceptable for the most storied program in USports history. They still played in the big game twice in those twelve years, but the bar was set high at Laval. Choquet was hired to get them back to that level.
The 2058 season saw Laval go 7-1 in regular season play and ended the season ranked #3 in the country, but they lost a 34-31 thriller to the #4 Montreal Carabins in the RSEQ final, so the Vanier Cup drought dragged on despite better results on the field. Choquet had started to implement his plan. But what he really needed was a star running back or two.
One of the main reasons he’d been hired was that he was a smooth talker and was supposed to be an excellent recruiter. The choice paid dividends with the recruiting class of 2059.
With the #1 prospect in the nation firmly atop his list, Choquet got to work. The problem he was facing this time was that the kid was a little bit too good.
“West Virginia?!” Choquet was shocked when he’d heard back from a scout talking to the family about their latest NCAA offer. “How are we going to compete with a school that was ranked 21 in the NCAA last year?!”
He was used to competing a little bit with smaller NCAA schools. Sometimes you lose the player anyway - most of the time, you can rely on the fact that hey - we’re Laval and the academics and being close to home to sway the decision. He had never had to deal with recruiting a prospect that a top NCAA school wanted. Most of the time, the Canadian kids good enough to get interest from those schools were as good as gone.
He called up Laval’s athletic director. “Look, we need this kid. Get me Frances Dansereau, get me Cedric Theriault, get me his entire family. We’re going to give them anything they want. And find out when the West Virginia visit is and let’s get him as soon as he comes back from it. Whatever he wants, we need to do it better than them.”
…
Cedric Theriault admits there were times during his campus visit in Morgantown that he legitimately thought about what life might look like playing for WVU.
But, from his position in the stadium while he watched Laval rally back from a 24-10 deficit in the fourth quarter to defeat Montreal 27-24 and advance back to the Uteck Bowl - hearing his hometown crowd explode when the game-winning 20-yard touchdown pass was thrown with 1:06 to play - he knew that there was only one place for him.
He had to play for his hometown team. He had to lift the Vanier Cup for the team he grew up watching.
The next day, he called coach Vincent Choquet to confirm he’d be at Laval for the 2060 season. He called the Mountaineers, too, to thank them for the visit, the opportunity, the interest they’d shown. But only Laval was home.
When the dust had settled on the 2059 recruiting season, Choquet and Laval had brought in the top class in the country, and it wasn’t even close. Theriault was joined in his commitment by two of the top-3 offensive lineman and seven of the overall top-25 recruits in the country. No other program had more than three top-25 players. The Rouge-et-Or lost the Vanier Cup game the next week, but it was clear that the country’s most storied program was back.
…
Standing at his own 15-yard-line and staring down a fierce headwind, Cedric Theriault watched the kickoff soar through the air.
“Jeez –” he thought, turning and running back inside his own five. The Concordia kicker had hit a big one, and the wind carried it deep. He brought the ball in at the two yard line and looked upfield. The blocking had actually set up pretty well. “Just gotta make this guy – ugh!”
The would-be tackler approached a little quicker than Cedric had expected, but he threw out an arm and Concordia #4 bounced off, falling to the turf. He kicked it into high gear, heading for the left sideline… crossing the 40, the 50, midfield, then cut back against the grain. “One more guy with a chance…” he realized. He head-faked, and it seemed like the remaining defender didn’t buy it, but he ran for the corner and noticed that the defender had underestimated his speed. The defender dove as Cedric rounded the corner and turned upfield. He felt the defender’s hand glance off his shoe and stumbled, but maintained his balance.
“See ya.”
Now at the Concordia 20-yard line, he was gone.
On the sideline, Vincent Choquet could hardly believe the play he’d witnessed. “My God. This kid is unbelievable,” he thought.
Theriault had just recorded a 108-yard kickoff return touchdown in just his second USports game. In his third USports game, against his parents’ alma mater McGill, he ran a punt back for a 77-yard score. It was hard to imagine a true freshman forcing himself into regular playing time on offense for a team as strong as Laval. But it was getting impossible to hold Theriault down.
…
It seemed like Cedric Theriault’s big breaks always came against Concordia.
With the Rouge-et-Or facing two losses ahead of him on their depth chart over the 2060 off-season, coach Vincent Choquet bumped Theriault to the #1 RB spot to begin 2061. He wanted to see how Theriault would handle the featured role against bigger, stronger players than he’d faced to this point in his career.
As it turned out - and as he perhaps should have expected - Theriault handled it very well.
He was bottled up a bit in the first quarter, held to 7 yards on 4 carries by an aggressive Concordia defense, and then in the second quarter, Theriault caught on to their aggressiveness and turned it against them. On Laval’s opening drive of the second quarter, Theriault carried the ball 6 times for 55 yards, capping it with a 13-yard touchdown run on a draw play for the first rushing score of his USports career.
Two third-quarter TDs by Theriault helped Laval stretch a 14-10 lead into a 42-17 scoreline heading into the fourth quarter, and Laval rested their starters.
Which included Theriault, who had stepped up with a 17-carry, 155-yard, 3-TD performance and left no doubt who their RB1 was.
The 2059 recruiting class was coming into their own. Laval was a powerhouse once again.
…
Week 7 of the 2061 USports season featured the Laval Rouge-et-Or taking on the Montreal Carabins - perennially the two best RSEQ teams, on a collision course for a meeting in the championship game at regular season’s end. Laval, 6-0, took on Montreal, 5-1, whose only previous loss was earlier in the season to Laval. First place in the RSEQ was on the line.
Theriault had seen less kick return action this season with his increased role on offense. He had been back for just seven returns in the season’s first six games. Today, coach Choquet thought, would be a good time to unleash him.
He fielded the opening kickoff and ran it back 51 yards to set Laval up on the Montreal 41-yard line to start the game. Three plays later, he took a screen pass 29 yards to the Montreal 1, leading to a touchdown. Then, after a two-and-out for Montreal, Theriault fielded a punt at midfield and ran it back to the Montreal 2, leading to another touchdown.
This was what Cedric Theriault did. When the moment got big, you gave the ball to Theriault. And you almost always got what you wanted.
The Carabins made a game of it, but couldn’t come back from Laval’s hot start. Laval would go on to a 38-27 win in which Theriault recorded 394 all purpose yards: 176 rushing, 39 receiving, 97 on kick returns, and 82 on punt returns.
…
“The most nervous I have ever been before a football game,” recalls Cedric Theriault, “was the night before the Vanier Cup against Calgary.”
You could tell the Laval program was gaining momentum towards regaining its prior dominance from the day Vincent Choquet took over as head coach. But now it felt real, with the Rouge-et-Or not just back in the Vanier Cup, but carrying the country’s #1 ranking and being favoured to win it for the first time in 16 years.
Laval’s stars - especially sophomore Theriault and redshirt sophomore QB Charles-Antoine Lemay - felt it. Some combination of excitement and nerves, opportunity and anxiety riddled Theriault, who couldn’t sleep until 5 AM the night before the game.
“It was kinda something I’d been dreaming about since I was 12 years old, so that probably just ramped everything up a notch,” Theriault explains.
The nerves were apparent in the early execution of the Laval offense. Theriault, who hadn’t fumbled all year, coughed the ball up on Laval’s first possession. Lemay, who had thrown just 5 interceptions all year, threw one on Laval’s second possession. The Laval defense held strong, and the score was 6-0 after the first quarter. Trailing 12-3, Laval finally caught an offensive break when Lemay took off for a 41-yard run on a play action passing play where the defense left him the entire left side of the field to scamper. That would lead to their first touchdown of the game and a 12-10 score.
The Calgary Dinos would stretch that lead to 22-10 before Laval finally really woke up. Held to 41 yards in the first three quarters, Theriault broke free for a 30-yard run that led to a field goal, then the Rouge-et-Or got a defensive score that cut the lead to 22-20. With five minutes left in the game, Laval began a final drive that saw Lemay feed Theriault for a couple of big plays both on the ground and through the air, and then hit senior wideout Pierre Catellier for a touchdown with 1:47 left on the clock and a 27-22 lead.
That would be the final score. Cedric Theriault’s vision of lifting the Vanier Cup for Laval had come true.
…
The 2062 Laval Rouge-et-Or were a veritable powerhouse. They didn’t lose a game all year, and Theriault picked up all sorts of accolades.
He recorded 150+ yards from scrimmage in all eight games, factoring into nearly every single game as a runner, returner, or receiver, with six 100-yard rushing games and four 150-yard rushing games. He broke 90 receiving yards four times, too, and scored 20 touchdowns (12 rushing, 6 receiving, 2 punt return).
Unanimously, Theriault was voted USports’ Most Outstanding Player and captured the Hec Crighton Award for it.
After breezing through the playoffs by beating Sherbrooke 55-7 in the RSEQ title game and Dalhousie 48-10 in the Uteck Bowl, #1 Laval set themselves up for a matchup against #2 McMaster in the Vanier Cup final. McMaster was easily the best opponent they’d play in the playoffs, but Laval were still considered strong favourites.
With the experience of last year to guide them, the Rouge-et-Or never really faltered. They won the game 41-31, with McMaster scoring a touchdown with 34 seconds left to make the score look a little better than it was. Theriault ran for 167 yards, including 72 in the fourth quarter to help kill the clock, adding 77 yards on 5 receptions, 121 yards on 6 punt returns, and 29 yards on one kickoff return - enough to match his career high of 394 all-purpose yards in a game.
Theriault celebrated the accomplishment with his teammates and let it all soak in. He knew it was time to make a decision - one that scared him a little, but one that he had to make for his future.
In USports, players have five years of eligibility. Theriault was already being hyped as the top prospect for the 2064 CFL draft well over a year away, if he decided to go back to school. There were NFL draft rumblings, too. And then, of course, there was interest from the ISFL/DSFL system.
He knew, in his heart, that the time was right to go pro, and so he made a difficult phone call to coach Choquet to let him know his time at Laval was over.
“I already knew,” Choquet said. “He was too good for USports. It’s one of the weird things about college football. You expect to have a guy for a certain amount of time but sometimes, they’re even better than you realize, and then they leave. I’ve got nothing but happiness for him. He did a lot for our program, and he’s so good. He deserves to take the next step in his career.”
…
Theriault didn’t officially declare his intention to play in the ISFL until after the S48 DSFL draft had happened, so he was placed on DSFL waivers and subsequently claimed by the Dallas Birddogs.
“Obviously, I’ve never played outside of Canada, and like - university football in Quebec is pretty big, it’s a lot bigger than it is anywhere else in Canada, but it all pales in comparison to football in the US, so it will be a very interesting experience,” Theriault says.
“The Birddogs had a rough go of it last year, you, uh, never want to go 1-13 obviously. It’ll be fun. I’m looking forward to the next chapter of my football career. This game has been my life for the last 10+ years and… I know I’ve had some success at it, I know I can be a good player in the DSFL and in the ISFL down the road.”
…
Maude Theriault, now 26, has followed in her mother’s footsteps - she was a 3rd round pick of the PWHL franchise in Montreal and has played for the past two seasons there, scoring 10 goals and 17 points.
Jacob Theriault, 24, enjoyed a three-year QMJHL career where he had 57 points and 314 PIM in 212 games. After spending a season split between the ECHL and AHL, he moved on from hockey to pursue other career goals.
Vanessa couldn’t be prouder of all three of her children. “They’re all just great kids, doing so well for themselves in what they want to do.”
“But, since you asked about Cedric - he had to kind of find his own way. Obviously with our family, there’s a lot of external pressure pushing you towards hockey. You get the “why did you quit hockey?” from outside from certain people… he knew what he wanted and what the right fit was for him and he went with it. And he’s become a star! We’re going to have to get down to Dallas and watch him play there at some point.”
RE: The Cedric Theriault Story - AustinP0027 - 05-22-2024
Rookie coming on strong with a huge paycheck media! You love to see it!