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.