Let's Show Some Love to St. Brigid's

The Ottawa Football Club executives began the formation a four-team football league in 1918 with the goal to develop local talent. Among the teams to come to life was St. Brigid's.

The league had issues around field availability in its early days. They managed a brief season and its initial championship was eventually won by Ottawa Collegiate.

The league grew to six teams in 1919. The purple, green and white clad St. Brigid's club would win all five of its games and take the championship that season. They were coached by Ottawa Sports Hall of Fame and Canadian Football Hall of Fame inductee Sylvester "Silver" Quilty.

In 1920 the city league, now back down to four teams again including St. Brigid's, became a "section" of the Quebec Rugby Football Union.

Brigid's went undefeated (6-0), secured the city championship, then played Westmount in a 2-game series to determine the QRFU champ. They won both games in the series as well by a combined score of 31-15. Their only defeat would come to the Hamilton Tigers Seconds in the Canadian Rugby Union intermediate finals.

St Brigid's would apply to add a senior team in the Ontario Rugby Union in 1921. Over the next couple of seasons, they would struggle against teams from Toronto.

The junior version would continue for a while but the senior club would serve its purpose of improving the Ottawa Rough Riders in an entirely different way. In 1923, it merged with the Big Four entry.

At this point, Ottawa had not won a championship since 1909 and was coming off a season in which they'd posted an 0-5-1 record. Quilty's team would only improve that mark to 1-5 in 1923 but Dave McCann assisted with the coaching and during practices.

McCann became a coach in 1924 (along with Walter Gilhooley who seems to get very little credit). They again showed slight improvement, putting together a 2-4 record, but optimism was still high, as seen in the November 18th Ottawa Citizen..

Indeed, they would win championships in consecutive seasons in 1925 and 1926 under McCann's leadership. Quilty and McCann both entered the Canadian Football Hall of Fame in 1966.

This is an era that I find somewhat misrepresented in "official" historical reports. It is often said that the Rough Riders changed their name to Senators in 1925 as a result of the merger with St. Brigid's. Clearly that is not the case since the merger actually took place in 1923. The Senators name was in use that year as well, on occasion, but Rough Riders also was used to refer to the club.

In any event, similarly to the Ottawa Trojans merging with the Rough Riders in the mid-40s in order to (among other things) improve the latter club, St. Brigid's did the same two decades earlier.