June 20th, 2003: Ottawa Renegades 27 @ Hamilton Tiger-Cats 17

There aren't many details to offer in regards to why this particular game summary is being posted today. Simply, I took a moment to add a few scores to the Renegades page from that season and decided to shine a spotlight on this season-opening contest. Any victory over Hamilton is a pleasure worth reliving anyway. 

I am reminded now that Hamilton went 1-17 that season and even that one victory very nearly eluded them.

The third-place-in-the-East Renegades still failed to make the playoffs because the fourth-place Western team (the BC Lions) crossed over and took their spot on the basis of having a better record. If not for that rule, Ottawa would have travelled to Toronto to play the 9-9 Argos, a team they were 2-1 against that year. Makes one wonder...

Just Added: The 1970 Laurentian Team Picture

And here it is for your viewing pleasure.  It was included in the November 14th Ottawa Journal, a few days after the championship game had actually been played. The game summary had already been located and posted.

I love that they included a roster though wish they'd given a numerical guide to identify who's who.

Either way, it's cool to see Bud MacRae's name on there. He's been mentioned on this blog in the past (and on the website that preceded it) as a great source of high school football info so coming across a little something about his playing days was a neat treat. 

Just Added: 1962 IJFL Game Summaries

The IJFL, the Ottawa Journal and the Ottawa Citizen made it relatively simple to gather some info about every game played in the four-team junior league that year. 

The league set its schedule so that all four team would play on the same days, usually on Sundays. As a result, the two newspapers at the time would cover both games in one article. I didn't have to find the Sooners game versus Gatineau then hunt down St. Bonaventure vs Hull, they were both in the same place. Handy!

I've tracked down and copied the articles which I felt did the better job of providing a detailed recap for each set of games, right from the first week of the season through to the two-game final, won in dominant fashion by the Ottawa Sooners.

I do wish they'd have included more photography. They only seemed to do so after the first weekend of action but on the upside, it offered a rare look at the St. Bonaventure Rough Riders.

St. Bonaventure was an interesting little team that sadly did not last long. The Sooners were the dominant club in this league but from time to time, St. Bonaventure would rise up and punch them in the mouth. In 1962, the Sooners posted a 9-1 record and the loss was by 14-12 to these Rough Riders. Being that the Sooners only began play in 1960, St. Bonaventure is probably the first true rival in their history.

The Rough Riders would change their name to Ottawa Trojans and play two more season before fading away. Because of a mention of them under the Trojans name in a previous post, the tag over on the right column under "Teams" for them is "Ottawa Trojans (Jr)". 

Just Added: 1956 Ashbury Team Photo

About a month ago, I posted a summary of Carleton's 1953 season pulled from the following year's school yearbook. The 1957 Ashbury College yearbook is the source of the images below, now appearing on the BCS Old Boys Cup page.

I believe there is an error in the first name of the third row. "Tiny" Hermann's full name is Charles Bismark Hermann so the "P" was probably intended to be a "B". He is referred to as C.B. Hermann on an earlier page. 

I like the mention of the Old Boys Cup in the photo. Coverage of this trophy, awarded annually for many years to the winner of competition between Ashbury and Bishop's College, is sometimes spotty so it's easy to wonder how big a deal it really was.

Back to Hermann, the image below was also from that same yearbook. It is nor clear if it was taken during a match-up against Bishop's so I didn't include it on Old Boys Cup the page but still thought it needed to be shared. If you're not familiar with Hermann, he played many years with the Rough Riders, was Carleton's first coach when the program began and, apparently, well-liked by his Ashbury players. He's a member of the Ottawa Sports Hall of Fame.

2010: Brad Sinopoli Wins the Hec Crighton Trophy

With today's announcement of Brad Sinopoli's retirement, much of the focus will be on his considerable achievements as a professional player. 

That being the case, I'd like to flashback to when he earned the top award available to a university football player. 

Thanks from the (not so) cheap seats, Mr. Sinopoli! Watching you perform has been a blast!

Just Added: 1955 JIFL Semi-Final

The name JIFL is used in the subject line because it is the acronym to the name used in the two game summaries that have been added to the IJFL page above. As mentioned previously, the league was referred to by several different names during its run.

One recap is for a mid-season game in which the West End Cobras upended St. Anthony's, the other is for the titular semi-final contest between St. Anthony's and the Hull Tigers. 

The latter game was accompanied by the image below rather than an in-game action shot.

Note that the league is again referred to by a different name in the caption. This lack of consistency did not make research any easier.

For those who may be unaware, Bruce Hamilton would later be the founder and first head coach of the Ottawa Sooners football club and enter the Ottawa Sports Hall of Fame in 1996 as a builder. There aren't a lot of photographs of those junior teams in papers from that era so coming across a good shot of Mr. Hamilton was a pleasant surprise.

Returning To The Field, Part 2: 1919

Various football unions ceased operations as World War I began, including the Interprovincial Rugby Football Union (Big Four). With the end of that conflict in late 1918, play would resume in 1919.

League and team executives met in Montreal on July 26th to work out rules changes, a schedule, etc. Expansion was considered but decided against.

The season would open with Ottawa meeting Montreal in the capital on October 4th, a game the home team won 10-03. 

It turned out to be premature to label them contenders. They defeated Toronto the following week (also at home) but lost their remaining four contests to fall to 2-4 on the season and last place in the union. 

What's this about Martin Kilt and a protest? I had to go back to mid-September to find an answer to that.

There was some disagreement about Kilt's eligibility to play but Ottawa claimed to have as many as three telegrams from the IRFU's board of directors confirming that he was good to go. I doubt that whole protest thing went anywhere, but now I'm curious about this altercation with this Ben Simpson guy. Might just need to look that up.

Returning To The Field, Part 1: 1945

2020 marked the first time since 1944 that the collection of teams of what is now the league's Eastern Division did not compete.

With an expected return to the field in August by the CFL, let's go back and see what happened the last time the league, and Ottawa specifically, came back from an interruption in play due to global circumstances.

The IRFU's simmering plans to return were communicated in an odd fashion by the Ottawa Citizen in March of 1945.

The announcement confirming that the league would indeed compete in 1945 was delivered slightly more professionally.

The Rough Riders brought back former coach Ross Trimble who had previously guided the team from 1937 to the IRFU's suspension of operations in 1941, including a Grey Cup victory in 1940. He had to request a leave of absence from the firm with which he worked in Hamilton but it was not expected to be a roadblock.

Perhaps a partial reason for his success was the football "school" he ran, referred to below. 

Tony Golab and George Fraser (more on him later) only warranted last name inclusion in the above paragraph because they had been mentioned earlier in the article. 

The 1945 IRFU (Big Four) season began on September 22nd with Ottawa hosting the Argos, a game won by the visitors 11-09.

That tertiary will need to tighten up! 😠

Okay, so...that sucked. Let's move ahead a week. 

The two teams would post 5-1 records on the season, leaving Montreal and Hamilton with one win each), and therefore meet in the two-game IRFU final as well. Ottawa and Toronto split those two games as well with Toronto winning the overall scoring by a 33-18 total. 

NCAFA Midget Adds Two Teams

Sharing a little bit of news that I missed earlier in the week.

In light of a Covid-cancelled 2020 season, seeing a little growth in the 16-18 age bracket is excellent news. 

The Raiders have a merchandise shop open if you'd like to support them that way. You can reach it here.

"Rough Rider Dad"

Partial credits for this article are included at the bottom of the second image but as the article will quickly make clear, it was written by George Fraser's son, Andy. Rough Rider Dad was the article's title, which I've cropped off.

I bought the October/November 2012 issue of Canada's History Magazine when it hit shelves at the time but had no memory of this article being included. I came across it this past weekend while cleaning out a drawer at my cottage and thought you fine folks might enjoy it. Sorry I didn't do a better scanning job of it. 

The article makes no mention of it but George Fraser was also involved with the 1943 and 1944 Ottawa Combines/Trojans. 

A Couple of 1991 Game Recaps

The Ottawa U. Gee-Gees knew how to pick 'em in the 1991 season. They won only two games out of seven, but one was the Panda game against Carleton and in the other, they bounced #2-ranked Queen's four weeks into the season. 

While gathering those 1991 Gee-Gees scores, I happened across a summary of a Sooners playoff victory and so copied that one too and am about to add it to their page. The final score for that one was 18-12.

2009: Sooners Return To, And Win, The OFC

"Hey, did you miss us?"

I had been working on locating some past results for the Ottawa Sooners. I added a few more from the 2004 and 2005 Quebec Junior Football League seasons, the point I'd reached in chronological order, but got bored with that and jumped ahead a bit.

In 2009, the Sooners returned to the Ontario Football Conference and once again gained the opportunity to play for a national championship, something the QJFL did not offer. They won the Conference's championship in their first year back but unfortunately bowed out to Edmonton in national play.

The game summary below is from the OFC championship game. The Sooners page now also includes the summary for the team's first game back in the OFC, a 41-14 beating of the Hamilton Hurricanes, and the OFC semi-final defeat of the London Beefeaters. 

The OHJFL Mid-Season Reboot

In a recent post about the origins of the Ottawa Rough Riders name, I mentioned that an interesting aspect to researching the early, formative years of this sport is how often you come across commonly-believed information that turns out to be false. Another is the weird scenarios that have presented themselves as the sport and its various levels of play have grown.

They may not have appeared odd that the time but certainly do by today's standards. In some cases, the casualness with which these events were reported make them even funnier. For example, I am referring to events such as (but not limited to)...

• The 1952 pro football draft taking several months to complete.
• The 1934 Rangers earning a league championship basically on the strength on one win.
• And even more recently, the Gee-Gee managing to have -2 points in the standings and evening that out with consecutive tie games, both against the same team, no less.

I stumbled into another last night. Recording scores is all fine and good but rather dry. For all leagues and levels, I want to be able to include more game summaries and images to make those pages more interesting.

I attempted to find some for the local junior league that started in 1952. Its details are listed under the IJFL page above but it changed names multiples times. In 1952 it was simply the Ottawa-Hull Junior Football League.

In the process of failing miserably to find summaries that were more than three paragraphs long, I located the reason why the game results I'd found in old newspapers and the official standings did not match. This had been bugging me for some time.

The league launched at the end of August that year and each team had played about four games until on September 25th... 

Just like that, the league decided to dump those completed games and start clean.

The full reason is not fleshed out but I suspect affiliation with the CRU required certain adjustments that the league preferred to make immediately. Perhaps its current rosters were not in line with CRU rules, who knows?

But if the 1952 portion of the IJFL page looks like a muddled mess, it happens to be reflective of the league at that point. Coverage of it was poor at the best of times, but the league didn't help its own cause by playing games late on weeknights. I suspect final scores were achieved too late to make the next day's morning edition and not important enough to report the day after.

Still, the Citizen saw fit to provide a team picture of its inaugural season champions so there's that. Coverage would improve once the league stabilized. 

Just Added: Paul Paddon's Hec Crighton Announcement

I noticed that I had stopped listing All-Canadians to the Gee-Gees page at about 1990 so I've added a few more as well as highlighted those who are now in the team's Hall of Fame, at least as individual performers.

The individual team pages can be a little dry so when I came across the announcement of quarterback Paul Paddon winning the Hec Crighton award in 1970, I thought I would add it as something of a page break between that section and the score listings.

It is a little disappointing, frankly. You'd think being named the country's best player would come with a bit more flash, but I was reminded that this award was only introduced in 1967 so it was fairly new at the time.

This is the Ottawa Journal's version of the announcement. 

Paddon joined the Gee-Gees program in 1967 and 1970 was his final year. He was inducted into the Gee-gees Hall of Fame in 1993.