By Mark Janzen /

The flu hit Notre Dame this past week and it wasn’t just your average fall sickness.

The Wilcox, Sask.-based Hounds had an outbreak of the flu, which included a couple of confirmed H1N1 cases.

So it was ‘hunker down and stay in Wilcox’ for both the Hounds and Argos.

“An advisory came out from the Health Region advising us to eliminate travel off campus and travel onto campus for a period of time,” said Del Pedrick, the Midget AAA Hounds coach. “We don’t have any H1N1 cases confirmed on our team but some have been confirmed at the school and being a residential school, there was concern for it to spread.”

Notre Dame’s sports teams at all levels were forced to stay in Wilcox and no other teams were allowed to come in for a game Oct. 16-21.

The practice schedule was also relaxed as teams wanted to ensure kids a chance of quality health.

“All of our teams have taken a reduced load right now to allow kids the chance to recover but there are still practices going on and, as the time goes on, we’ll pick up our intensity and volume of practices,” Pedrick said.

“But I think they’re encouraged that it’s turning around right now. They were encouraged on the weekend. The concern was rising last week as we had more kids go to our health care unit so they wanted to make sure they stemmed that off. But I guess we’ll find out more day-to-day as we see how the kids are doing.”

Once the health issues are cleared up, the problem now becomes playing the 
missed games.

“I think the biggest thing will be fitting game times in. Now we have to scrunch more games into a tighter time frame and distance will be a challenge. For the Argos, they have to travel to Prince Albert and Tisdale and for us (the Hounds), we have to go to Battleford.”

While most of the teams haven’t been hit with much more than common flu bugs, it was not something that was taken lightly.

The plan was to see what the Health Region suggested on Wednesday and, in all likelihood, return to normalcy.

But for a week in Wilcox, the H1N1 virus that has created panic in a variety of circles, was real.