Three months of preparation has led to the next two days for the Saskatchewan Selects football program.

The Selects have four teams down in San Antonio, Tex. for the 2018 Alamo City Pigskin Classic, which will see them take on teams from Texas, California, Virginia, Mexico and Manitoba.

“I’m very excited, it’s a great opportunity to play some high level football against some high level competition,” said Swift Current’s Ethan Kurtz, who’s suiting up for the 16-and-under team at the tournament.

There’s ten players from Swift Current in total taking part in the tournament across the four teams for the Selects.

The players came together in November to start practicing and have been working to get to this point since then.

“I’ve really been able to enhance all my skills over that time,” said Kurtz. “We’re getting coached by great coaches and they teach you how to be an overall better football player and better man.”

This is the second season with the Selects for the 15-year-old Kurtz, who travelled with the 14U team to Florida last year.

He said he’s seen his game grow leaps and bounds over the past two years with the program, “It really shows when you go back to your club team, this year was my first year playing high school football and you could tell the difference between people that have been in this program.”

Texas is the heart of football in the United States and Kurtz said they’re ready to show them what Saskatchewan is capable of on the football field this weekend.

“You never know what to expect, but there’s going to be some good games, some big guys out there,” he said. “We just need to execute what we’ve learned about and just go 100 percent all the time, we can’t give up.”

The 16-and-under team will open the tournament against the Monterrey Bay All-Stars from California on Saturday. They kick-off at 5 p.m. from Gayle and Tom Benson Stadium on the University of Incarnate Word campus.

The 12-and-under team is the first team to hit the field for game action when they take on the San Antonio True Blue at 8 a.m. Saturday. The 10U team will square off with the San Antonio Arsenal at 11 a.m. and the 14U team is in action against the South Texas Extreme at 12:30 p.m.