Brendon LaBatte is driven to succeed.
After trying to help the Saskatchewan Roughriders achieve their goals during the CFL season, the veteran offensive lineman usually spends his off-season trying to thrive on race tracks.
So far this year, LaBatte has travelled to Texas and Nebraska to compete in International Motor Contest Association (IMCA) stock car races. Trips to Missouri and Iowa also are on his schedule.
For LaBatte, there’s a correlation between his two chosen sports that goes beyond the basic idea of competition.
“You go down there (to the United States for races) and you come back so much more knowledgeable than when you left,” the 31-year-old product of Weyburn says. “To me, that’s the transfer between racing and football. You work all week to study and prepare or do whatever you’ve got to do and then you find out on the weekend if you did enough.
“It’s great to do things with a big group of guys like (the Roughriders), where you have 70 or 80 guys in the room. But I don’t think there’s anything with more accountability than when you race with just yourself, your dad (Dale) and your brother (Sterling). You’re there with your family and you don’t want to be the guy behind the wheel who lets everybody down.
“The biggest thing that racing has taught me is accountability. What you do behind the wheel has an effect on everybody.”
LaBatte began his racing career when he was 15, putting his learner’s license to good use as he drove to the track for the first time.
His dad had always been mechanically inclined and LaBatte himself was hands on, but a visit to the newly opened Estevan Motor Speedway in 2000 convinced the LaBattes to get involved.
“Once we got into it, it was easy to see the value of it,” Brendon says. “The best family time we had was out in the shop working. You’d get off the bus (from school) at 4 o’clock and go out there until 10 or 11 o’clock at night. That was what we always did.
“It’s a never-ending quest. You can think you know something and have something figured out, but you may not. Everybody’s working at it for the same amount of time, so everybody’s working to get better. It just consumes you.
“You can spend hours just thinking about what the car needs. What has kept us going is the quest to find that secret recipe and put it all together at one of these big shows.”
LaBatte says racing is his “second job” in the off-season. He works out in the mornings to prepare for the upcoming football season and then spends the afternoons getting ready for races.
His road trips don’t curtail his training sessions, though. He finds gyms on the road where he can work out if he feels the need — and he gets his heart pumping during races, too.
“It’s a pretty good cardio workout,” LaBatte says with a grin. “You get in there for 30 laps and sweat it up.
“It tests the focus, too. That’s the biggest carryover between the two (sports): The ability to make a quick-reaction decision to what you see. Stuff is coming at you fast. You may only have a split-second to cut in between two cars or whatever it is. That’s a lot of what the O-line is: See it happen fast in front of you and be able to react.”
LaBatte hasn’t been in any significant accidents during his racing career, especially in recent years. His football career and his growing family are always on his mind, so he tries to play it safe on the quarter- and half-mile tracks.
It’s interesting that the LaBattes have chosen a 6-foot-4, 320-pounder to do the driving instead of a smaller family member. But Brendon jokingly suggests he gets behind the wheel because he has done it longer than his brother — and because Brendon is comfortable making the quick decisions necessary on the track.
“I guess you’ve got to look at it and decide who’s going to give you the best chance for success,” he says with a chuckle. “We’ll hit them with the Chris Jones plan and put our best lineup out there.”
Jones — the Roughriders’ head coach, general manager and vice-president of football operations — and his staff have made a number of changes to the team’s lineup this off-season.
Players such as quarterback Kevin Glenn, offensive lineman Derek Dennis and linebacker Henoc Muamba were released, while the likes of quarterback Zach Collaros, defensive linemen Zack Evans and Charleston Hughes, offensive lineman Travis Bond and tailback Jerome Messam were added.
LaBatte may have been down south at times during the off-season, but he paid attention to what Jones was doing. And LaBatte, who has experienced some tight racing over the years, expects to see a similar level of battling once the Roughriders open training camp.
“You look at every position on the depth chart and the guy behind the starter is capable of playing,” LaBatte says. “There’s a bunch of competition — and that’s how it has been since Coach Jones came in. They don’t put a body out there just to have a body out there; these guys are all very capable of playing.
“The best thing we have going for us right now is the depth of talent. There are going to be a lot of battles to see who plays — and that’s always a good thing.”
