1945: Arnie McWatters is Awarded the Imperial Oil MVP Award

I'd gradually been putting together a list of the men who have played for the Ottawa Combines/Trojans of the ORFU from 1943 to 1947 prior to that team amalgamating with the Rough Riders.

The list usually only grew in small spurts. Today, I decided to dedicate some time to that task specifically.

I took a longer look at some mid-week articles from September through November of 1945 and 1946 instead of only game summaries from that time range. The mid-week articles often listed injured players being removed from the roster and their potential replacement as teams resumed training. They used the players' full name in doing so. Far too often, game summaries only refer to players by family name. 

Reaching the end of 1945, I landed on the union's MVP award announcement. It was given to Trojans  veteran player/coach Arnie McWatters and that seemed like a notable achievement to record here. I believe McWatters is the only Ottawa recipient of the award but that's hardly shocking since Ottawa was in the ORFU only a short period of time while that award was being handed out. 

McWatters was the most valuable player but was not named to the union's all-star team. Only George Sprague represented Ottawa in that regard. That would suggest that McWatters' coaching ability and sportsmanship were substantial decision influencers in determining his "value".

McWatters' career started in Sarnia but he joined the Rough Riders in 1939, won the Grey Cup with them in 1940, and stayed with the club until it was disbanded after the 1942 season because of WW2. He then joined the Ottawa Combines/Trojans in 1943 and stayed with that club until the aforementioned merger with the Rough Riders prior to the 1948 season. He has coached at both Ottawa universities. 

1940 Ottawa Rough Riders Sketches

I've added a few brief snippets of game summaries from the two match-ups between the Ottawa Rough Riders and the Balmy Beach for the 1940 Grey Cup as well as the team pictures below from the December 9th Ottawa Citizen.

Based on the citizen's coverage, the city was quite proud of its first championship team since 1926. The newspaper provided brief (and sometimes maybe a little padded) "sketches" of the team's roster. That would take up quite a bit of space on the Grey Cup page so I've added them below instead for, hopefully, your reading pleasure. 

Man, there were some quality people on that team. Several have been named to several halls of fame and/or later excelled as coaches and/or builders.

I might spend more time on this specific team, their combined successes are impressive. 

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.

Update On Updates

I've made quite a few updates to a number of pages on this blog but unless you were looking specifically for them, you couldn't possibly know about them.

Some are rather dry, "bookkeeping" types, like recording RedBlacks draft results. If you were looking to find out who the team drafted in 2017, there are several places you could look, but I prefer to keep that data here as well for my own reference.

Others are much harder to come by (like the 1952 Rough Rider draft results in the previous post). It is those ones that I wish to share with you today.

Rather than write out a few lines from some Panda Game recaps, when possible I've carved out the newspaper article(s) about the game and posted that under the score. I've done this for a few of the ones in the 80s and 90s, including the 1989 game below which included a rather good celebration pic.

Clicking on either image should make it easier to read, either off this post or on the Panda Game page itself.

I also dug up all the results from the Ottawa Sooners' 1974 National Championship season. That took more effort than I'd anticipated. Due to playing two two-game series in the playoffs, they actually played 16 games in total that season. Stats from the championship game are included now as well.

I'll segue from that to updates to the IJFL page. Several scores have been added to the long-defunct junior league but anyone interested in the early days of the Sooners should give that page a look. Many (all?) of the accomplishments from their first decade of existence are recorded there. I'll probably copy a lot of it onto their own page but as long as I have it in at least one place, that's good enough for now.

I've built a page for the Grey Cup. Again, this is mostly information you can get in many, many places, however I thought it would be interesting to copy directly from the newspapers of the time, mostly the Ottawa Citizen and Ottawa Journal. I'll probably add to that later today. I particularly liked finding the two-page spread of the 1926 champs.

Finally, on the Ottawa Trojans page, I've added an added an article about that team changing its name from Combines between 1943 and 1944 and picture which displays their uniform quite nicely. That's been hard to land.

This is all in addition to adding whatever details I come across about high school, midget and junior championships.