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.