The Central Alberta Buccaneers season ended on Saturday following a 46-0 playoff loss to the Airdrie Irish in Calgary.
They faced off in the Alberta Football League (AFL) quarterfinals but due to a shortage of players, the Bucs were no match for the Irish.
"Airdrie is a good team but I'll be honest I think our team result was a reflection of the number of people we had rather than the skill difference," Buccaneers head coach Geoff Rambaut said on Wednesday.
"It's hard today the result would have been different if we had prepared differently... It ultimately came down to at one point we had 14 healthy players on the bench. It's hard to play competitive football with that."
Most recently, they started the game with 19 players, which isn't great, to begin with, but lost five more players throughout the game. Many of those players were playing on offence and defence.
"The guys were playing their hearts out. They played for more than you can ask from a group of 19 guys to play on the football field... That didn't do us any favours but Airdrie played well. They didn't pass very successfully against us but they did run the ball very well," he said adding they couldn't counter their attack.
That seemed to be the Buccaneers kryptonite this season. They've battled the injury bug consistently throughout the year.
After beating the Calgary Wolfpack 36-14 in week one of the season in Lacombe, things quickly unraveled losing five straight to end the regular season.
"It was very apparent from the start of the season that our low numbers were going to affect what we did but I'll saw the strength of the organization has been the quality of talent on the roster. We just need more of those players," he said.
"Recruiting from Red Deer and the communities around that will be huge in the next five or six months. We'll be looking to build a roster of 45-50 going into next year. You can't ask 20 guys to carry a team through a competitive season. The league is getting better and as a result you need to bring more to the table and not less."
Overall, Rambaut said they didn't play to lose and feel that the team is past the development stage and is in win-now mode. Despite that, he feels the near future is bright for the Buccaneers.
"From that viewpoint it's frustrating, it's very hard, and not the result we wanted. The takeaway from this is if you were going to take the group of guys we have between 18 and 23 we'd probably have the strongest roster of players in the league," he said.
"The result was frustrating but the positive is the reason the Bucs have been successful in years past they have a great culture that developed internally and I think we're seeing the start of the next generation of Buccaneers."
