Just Added: The 2005 Athletes In Action Senior Bowl

Finding results and summaries of past AIA Bowl games has been challenging. Some years you might stumble into an article about preparations for the game but not its actual outcome. One year in particular, the Citizen had a picture from the game but didn't provide a score in the caption or a connecting story.

The proverbial torch was being passed from one organizer to another in 2005 and as a result, the contest generated a little more local media attention that year. All that is explained by Mr. Martin Cleary below.

Just Added: The 1985 AIA Seniors Game

To be accurate, since posting about this game earlier this month, I've created a page specific to it (see above) and added scores for all the games between 1975 and 1986 and recaps for most of those.

I found 1985's recap interesting because it is the shortest one of any of those games to the point that I've reached, yet it would prove to hold the most future star power. It names only two players and both turned out to be huge deals.

Mark Brown that was inducted in the Carleton Ravens Hall of Fame in 1996. If that link fails, it points out that Brown set Ravens records for yards gained in a game, season, and career and he was named the school's male athlete of the year in 1986 and 1987, among many other awards.

Chris Flynn, meanwhile, was a three-time winner of the Hec Crighton trophy while at St Mary's University, given to the most valuable player in Canadian University football. He took St Mary's to the National Championship game twice. He was with the Ottawa Rough Riders in 1996 and entered the Canadian Football Hall of Fame in 2001. Both men played with the Ottawa Bootleggers. 

I'm sure if the writer and his editor had known that the guys he was watching would go on to be so decorated, the game would have warranted more than four paragraphs of coverage. 😉

The AIA Game

I need to thank the two gentlemen below for the inspiration for this post and, eventually, a page devoted to the Athletes In Action football game.

The Athletes In Action high school football game has been running since the mid 70s. I recall posting about it a bit on the previous version of this website, which crapped out in 2014 or so, so it was run until recently though not with anywhere near the amount of media coverage that it received upon its launch. Normally played in May, it tended to serve as the unofficial start of the football season, in my view.

Initially, in 1975, it was the capping event of a training camp held by the Ottawa Rough Riders and, for all intents and purposes, an all-star game between players from the Carleton and Ottawa school board teams.

Athletes In Action began sponsoring it the following year, I believe. Bear with me, I'm still doing a bit of research. 😉

At the start of camp, on a Tuesday, 104 players were said to have registered. It was expected that some would drop out as the work started but an article the following Friday pointed out that not a single one had left by that time.

The recap of the first game, played the next Monday, follows. 

Kind of neat to read about the Cook brothers in this game as both would play for the Ottawa Rough Riders later on. 

There will be much more added here about this annual event.