Rod Smylie of the Ottawa Trojans

The image below is from the September 29th, 1947, Ottawa Citizen. There are very few images of the Trojans that are of even decent quality so I like to capture all the ones I come across.

That was the fourth game of the 1947 season for the Trojans. They had tied the first and lost the next two so this was their first victory of the season.

The two major papers at the time (Citizen and Journal) speculated that the team had turned the proverbial corner after going winless in 1946 and they turned out to be correct. The team would finish with a 5-4-1 record and win the Ontario Rugby Football Union.

The line-ups for those games often only listed last names but the recap for this one itself was quite detailed so I've begun a list of players who have performed for the Trojans from their 1943 season as the Combines to their final season in 1947. It'll be a slow build, as I'll only add to it when I happen to see a game report which displays full names, but gradually the mighty Trojans will be fully represented. 

We Should Know More About...Matt Anthony

The mention of Matt Anthony in the earlier post about the 1947 all-star team added a little emphasis to the breadth of his contributions to the game for me.

In adding game results for the Gee-Gees over the past few months, his name appeared constantly. And so it would, since he was head coach there for 15 years. I continued to come across it when doing the similar research for the Sooners.

His playing career is less celebrated (in my view, anyway), as is his coaching stint for the St Patrick's team, but when those are taken into account, he has impacted the game positively at the high school, junior, university and pro levels as either a coach or player. Very few people can make that claim.

Let's let the also seemingly ever-present Martin Cleary break it all down for us. The article below is in effect Anthony's sports obituary from the Ottawa Citizen following his passing in 2000.  

The article accurately states that Anthony was the Sooners head coach in 1971 but he was also an assistant on the 1970 team.

I've been trying to determine when he coached at St. Patrick but I can't seem to land on that. I'm not questioning whether or not he did, but I would like to see if he had his standard level of success there. This post will be updated if I finally manage to find those results.

The 1947 Eastern All-Star Team

The 1947 Eastern All-Stars included players from both the Ottawa Rough Riders and Ottawa Trojans even though they played in different leagues and, while it is irrelevant to this site, the university of Western Ontario also contributed a few players to the second team.

At the time, players were chosen from all Eastern football-playing unions, whether Interprovincial (or Big Four, meaning the Riders), the Ontario Rugby Football Union (Trojans) and even the university teams.

Interesting approach, though based on this particular year's dominant results, the IRFU was already judged to be the highest level of play even between pro leagues.

I haven't looked at the all-star teams for the 1945 and 1946 season, the other years in which the Trojans and Rough Riders both played but in different unions, to see whether players from both teams were included. The Trojans and Rough Riders would merge in 1948 though, so if this is not the first time it's happened, it's certainly the last.

Here are the IRFU selections in particular, obviously ecstatic at having been chosen. 

Haigh, in particular, looks like he has somewhere to be! 😄 

Just Added: Ottawa Jr. Riders 35, Ottawa Sooners 20, 1999 QMJFL Semifinal

The Ottawa Jr Riders and Ottawa Sooners traded punches for a few years when both clubs played out of the Quebec Junior Football League but 1999 most definitely belonged to the Riders. They won both regular season contests that year by scores of 42-07 and 42-14.

The semifinal was closer but still very clearly the Jr Riders' game. Read on. 

The Riders would thump the Chateauguay Raiders the following week in the league's championship game. That recap has been on the Jr Riders page for some time.

2002: Winnipeg Blue Bombers 24 @ Ottawa Renegades 25

This is another game recap offered up as a post because it would have been an awkward fit on the team's basic info page.

The Renegades started their inaugural 2002 season with an overtime loss at home to Saskatchewan.

They travelled to Edmonton the next week and lost there 40-24. They had started strong in that game but it unraveled on them. 

Their third game was at home against a Winnipeg team that had accumulated a 14-4 record the previous year and lost the Grey Cup game to Calgary. There wasn't much reason for optimism and yet, somehow, the Renegades pulled it off.

The 'Gades were playing in Winnipeg the following week. I recall telling the Winnipeg fan sitting behind me to let Ottawa fans have their fun for a while because Winnipeg was going to murder the Renegades in the next game.

Sure enough, the Blue Bombers won that one 55-07. I was really just trying to be polite and sportsmanlike, I would have been perfectly happy with being wrong...

The Renegades only won three more games all year. Two of those were also only by one point including the last game in Montreal in which the Als were resting many of their better players for a playoff run. The four-win total was not particularly impressive but at the time it was considered respectable enough for an expansion team. 

1943: Ottawa Combines 20, Toronto Navy 07

I was looking to beef up the Ottawa Trojans page by including long game recaps such as the one below would be awkward so I include it as a blog post instead.

The team used the name Combines for their first year and changed it to Trojans the following year until they merged with the Ottawa Rough Riders in 1948. 

This was the team's first victory of the season after losing their first six, hence the opening paragraph snark.

Just Added: 1984 Ottawa Sooners Results

I have been trying to identify a pivotal moment which caused coverage of junior football in town to start circling the drain.

Starting from their first season in 1960, as the Sooners' range of competition grew, so did the coverage. They gradually went from playing for a city championship to playing for a national crown and were competitive throughout most of that time. The media interest increased accordingly, naturally.

1984 was a championship year for them but I noticed that at points during the regular season, certain game recaps were suddenly quite brief. Where they normally could take up a third of a page in the Ottawa Citizen sports section, some were now only deemed worthy of a handful of short paragraphs. Few articles included photography, whereas for many years the majority did.

In 1984, the Sooners had not lost a regular season game since September of 1982, occasionally put up scores in the 70s and 80s, and won the conference with two games left to play. I suspect that their degree of dominance became a bit ho-hum for local media. Games won by 60 don't generate much excitement and playing one team four times out of nine (as was the case with the Montreal Jr. Concordes) must have become tedious as well.

The playoff created a spark, of course, and for a while there coverage was back to the way it had been for the past decade or so. The recap of the Eastern Championship game below is a good example. 
 

There are other factors in the decline in media interest over the years, no doubt. The team would have some rather ordinary seasons later in the 80s and then move to the Quebec league, meaning that they would no longer compete nationally. Their visibility being so reduced probably lead to their coverage being scaled back.

The Sooners page now includes all their game result for that season, the conference all-star team selections and portion of a recap of the national championship game. I'll keep working my way up to the present until the reduced coverage dictates that I can't.

Just Added: 1983 High School Results

Now that I have at least brief recaps of most of the high school championship games between 1927 and 2010 or so, I'm going to start filling out individual seasons with scores, standings, etc.  A football fan can find information about what the university teams did in any given year relatively easily but it is much harder to do so for the high school level so I want that recorded better.

It should help clear up some confusing result that have taken place along the way. We had two champions in 1983, for example. By then, the champions of the Carleton and Ottawa school boards had met numerous times to determine a city champ, but in 1983 field conditions were such that the final had to be cancelled. As a result, it seems that many records do not recognize an overall winner for that season but in reality, each school board had named a champion that year. Those two teams just never got to play one another.

Let's start with Carleton champion St. Pius. I have located all but one regular season score for them but we do know that they went 6-0 that year. They got away with one in the semi-final against Garneau though. Weather was involved in that result as well.

The result of their Carleton Board final game against J.S. Woodsworth was more decisive, however.

Meanwhile, Ridgemont put together a rather modest 3-3 regular season but rattled off three straight playoff wins to take the Ottawa board banner. Their championship game was played the day after Pius' but obviously weather and field conditions hadn't improved a great deal in just 24 hours.

I've added a championship to each team's total on the High School page with an asterisk. It's not like the teams chose not to participate, they simply weren't able to. I see no reason why they shouldn't be recognized then. My acknowledgement means absolutely nothing, I'm fully aware of that, but I at least want the information out there a little more.

Just Added: The 1993 and 1994 Panda Games

The Ottawa Citizen recaps for those games can be found on the "Panda Game" page above but in locating those I came across another game recap which might be of interest.

There is so much attention given to the Panda Game that it is sometimes easy to forget that not every game between these two teams is a Panda Game. They often played twice a year with one of those games designated as the Panda Game. 

The recap below is for an early season game in 1993 between U. of O. and Carleton in which Carleton finally snapped a lengthy losing streak. It sounds like it was generally sloppy but with a big finish.

As stated in that final paragraph, Carleton headed to Queen's the following weekend and pulled that one off too, in slightly more convincing fashion.

And...that would be that. They did not win a game the rest of the season, closing it out with a 2-5 record which included a Panda Game loss.

Not that the Gee-Gees fared much better; they ended up 3-4 and one-and-done in the playoffs. I doubt tying that first game against Carleton would have given them a much better playoff seeding and altered their fate much but that missed kick gave Carleton a little timely positivity.

One To Watch: North Carolina's Patrice Rene

For a variety of reasons, I've found the NCAA season difficult to get into this past year. The bowl games don't mean much to me but I do plan on sitting down in front of the Orange Bowl tonight specifically for Patrice Rene. If you're unfamiliar with him, here's a little write up Tim Baines did for the Ottawa Citizen in September of 2019.

Where did Rene end up in the draft rankings? As of the league's first edition this past October, he was ranked eighth overall. His status for the NFL draft is less clear, however.

Rene has played in nine games this season and registered 20 solo tackles plus eight assists. The depth chart I located showed him as a back up for the Tar Heels but I'll be looking out for #5 nonetheless.