Nov 11th, 2005: Merivale 22, Colonel By 02

The high school page was originally built to include only the senior level. Generally speaking, the site tracks football from ages 17 onwards so junior high school football doesn't get much attention.

For a few years in the mid-2000s, the senior level operated in two tiers. I believe the major difference was that tier one could compete provincially, and tier two did not. Tier one, then, was perceived as being the superior of the two and got all the attention here.

Whether that perception is accurate or not, tier two was still senior football and now that the high school page is filling up quite nicely, it's time to start adding the second tier, starting with Merivale's championship in 2005. Standings and playoff results leading up to that game have been added, as well as a brief summary of St. Peter's semifinal win in Tier 1.

I'm not sure exactly why the article goes off a cliff like that at the end but that's not my doing. 

2021 NCAFA Midget Championship Highlights

A big thank you to the fine folks at HESN for putting this video together for a game I would have loved to get to but couldn't. 

"Bob Simpson: How We Won Grey Cup"

While suffering through yet another Redblacks loss, I completed the bulk of the work on the page dedicated to the Rough Riders seasons between 1945 and 1960.

1960 was a Grey Cup winning season so while gathering some details about that year, I took some time to also fatten up the Grey Cups page. I've now added a more standard game summary article by Jack Koffman for the Ottawa Citizen.

While looking for that additional content, I also came across the following article by Riders receiver Bobby Simpson. It appeared the Monday after the Grey Cup game in his hometown newspaper, the Windsor Star. As you'll see, it's essentially his take on what caused Ottawa to be capable of taking home the Cup and provides an interesting perspective, I think.

So What Happened Before 1926?

Records of past high school champions tend to start from 1927. In December of 2019, I tried to figure out the structure of high school ball prior to that year. did they not play at all? Or were schools playing but only in exhibition contest?

There did appear to be a local champion in 1926, namely Ottawa College, but they clinched the championship when Glebe defeated Lisgar late in the season. Lisgar had been the only team left to challenge for first place in the circuit so Ottawa College won the championship due to the result of a game in which they did not participate. You can read more about that here.

So then, was there a champion prior to Ottawa College in 1926?  It would appear so and as is so often the case, I found it by fluke. 

I was adding some more information about the 1966 high school season, won by Nepean, their first and only one.

Or was it??? (As Rod Black would say)

Early in the newspaper game summary, this part stands out. 

Well, then, let's see what happened in 1925.

In looking for additional information/confirmation, I located a bunch of Nepean high school yearbooks in pdf format added to the Lost Ottawa Facebook page by one Martha Aksim in 2018. The 1926 edition was included, much to my pleasant surprise, and it features the 1925 team rather prominently. There are summaries of every game including the 12-01 victory over Glebe described above as well as the photograph below.

You'll note that it states Dominion Interscholastic champs.

The yearbook explains further. The newspaper article above explained that Nepean was expected to meet Renfrew shortly after defeating Glebe. Nepean did just that and defeated them 7-4 for the Ottawa Valley crown.

Cornwall was next on the schedule. We'll let the yearbook take it from here.

Hell of a run!

Having shared the 1925 team picture, and having the Nepean yearbooks at my fingertips right at the moment, let's take a second to display and honour the 1966 too, then.

New Page: EOSSA Championship

We have expansion! More and more info is being added to the High School page so to make things a bit more manageable, a new page has been built specifically for the Eastern Ontario championship that existed between 1927 and 1946. This involved Ottawa-based schools playing teams from towns such as Kingston, Smiths Falls, Perth, and so on. The information already gathered is being moved and more is being added.

Ottawa U. first claimed the EOSSA championship for the area in the contest's second year. Glebe lost the first in 1927 but they would go on to win quite a few in the 30s.

Here's a summary of UOttawa's 1928 victory. I was not able to track down a similar recap of the game against Hamilton mentioned at the end of the first paragraph so it may not have actually taken place.

Just Added: 1963 High School Championship, Ridgemont 33 vs. Laurentian 00

I've tracked down most (perhaps "all", it's difficult to tell with high school seasons sometimes) of the scores from Ridgemont's 1963 season and added a fairly thorough game summary of the championship contest.

I had to laugh as I began to read it. The very first sentence points out that Ridgemont's QB's last name is often spelled incorrectly and sure enough I had it wrong on the High School page. I must have come across an article which made that very mistake and copied that error myself. Oops. 

Just Added: The 2001 Manson Cup, Ottawa Sooners 18, Ottawa Jr. Riders 17

There was a post added last weekend in which the Ottawa Jr. Riders were celebrated for solidifying the position in the local amateur football scene in 1998, partially at the expense of the Ottawa Sooners.

If that was the case, 2001 was the year the Sooners reclaimed their spot. They defeated the Jr. Riders twice in the regular season that year then again in the league's championship game.

The first contest was the most decisive, a solid 13-point victory. The second was a one-point victory in overtime at Frank Clair Stadium, then the Jr. Riders' home turf (the Sooners played at Minto field primarily, if not exclusively, I believe). The championship game was also won by a single point. Details  about that one are provided below.

The Riders would leave the Quebec league the following year for the Ontario Football Conference in an attempt to compete for a national championship in the Canadian Junior Football League, in which the QJFL did not participate. They fared poorly over the course of four seasons until their return to the Quebec circuit in 2006.

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. 

1997 QMJFL Championship: Sooners 13, Jr. Riders 07

I thought this game summary had been posted years ago but I'm unable to find any sign of it. In light of how many "firsts" took place that season (1997 was the first Jr. Riders season and therefore their first playoff appearance, it was the first Sooners Quebec crown, etc.), I'm surprised it wasn't added early on.

Out of curiosity, I tried to locate the game summary in the Montreal Gazette. It was a mighty struggle because two Ottawa-based teams in the Quebec league probably didn't sit well.

Sure enough, it generated all of two paragraphs containing 56 words in total, by my count. 😉  If they found it difficult to swallow, the next few years would be awful hard on them indeed. 

St. Patrick's High School's Golden Era

The 1953 St. Patrick's senior high school team would lose that year's championship game 17-00 to Fisher Park in a contest that had to be played a second time because the first ended in a scoreless tie.

If that loss was discouraging for supporters of the "Celts", the next couple of years would prove to be quite rewarding. St. Patrick would go undefeated throughout the 1954 and 1955 seasons, playing in 17 contests without a loss (15 wins and two ties, to be exact) and, obviously, securing the championship both years. The 1955 team picture is below and was added to the High School page earlier today.

Different reports suggest different lengths to St. Patrick's undefeated streak. Some say it was 16 undefeated games, some claim it was 17.

The solution is simple; the 17 total includes a victory in the Red Feather tournament described in the March 18th, 2021, post on this blog. Whether that game should be included is certainly debatable since the Red Feather event is essentially an out-of-town exhibition for charity. Nevertheless, St. Pat's did win the game in which they participated for that event so let's work with 17.

I became curious as to when the streak ended. It was 17 going into the 1956 season. Did they extend it at all? Did they reach 20+ games undefeated?

I was expecting some drama around the event but...The streak ended right away. Their next defeat took place in the opening contest of the 1956 season against Ottawa Tech. St. Patrick's streak started with the first game of 1954 and ended in the first game of 1956, exactly two undefeated seasons.   

St. Patrick was unfazed by the loss, however. In fact, they suffered another loss during the season to finish with a 3-2 record but still ultimately won the league's championship for the third year in a row. And they did it against the team that ended their streak, no less.

That would mark then end of St. Patrick's dominant run. They would come close to winning the crown again in 1971, and were named co-champions of their school board in 1972, but they have not earned a senior football title since the 1956 season.

1981: Ottawa Trojans 22, Dukes of Gloucester 00 (Midget)

It was the Midget page's turn to get some attention this morning.

Records on this page of the early years of the Midget level in Ottawa tended to be little more than championship scores and partial recaps of those games. I've now been able to find most scores for the 1980 and 1981 seasons. 

As stated at the top of that page, the Midget level came into being with the birth of the Ottawa Trojans in 1980. They were joined by Dukes of Gloucester the following year. Their meeting in early September of that year, then, was the first between Midget teams in Ottawa. 

I already had a recap of the Trojans' championship victory later that year but it was of poor quality. I have found a cleaner version of it and replaced the original with it. 

Finally, I've come across a brief article listing the year's award winners. Unfortunately it, too, is a little rough looking. Sorry 'bout that. 

The Nepean Norsemen would join the league in 1982. I'll seek to locate some background on that team as well shortly. 

The Centennial Bowl

The University of Ottawa celebrated 100 years of football in 1981 and in doing so, attempted to add a little significance and emphasis to its regular match-ups against (very) long-time rival Queen's.  

The plan was to hand out a trophy to the winner of the game annually, much like what is done with Pedro for the Panda Game or the Old Boys Cup that was in play for the Ashbury / Bishop's meetings for many years. The trophy to be put in use had some interesting history of its own, as did the gentleman after whom it was named. 

Unfortunately, the result of the Ottawa U. / Queen's game was not what the university had hoped for.  

Bummer. Ottawa won a close one the following year though...

...but beyond that the Centennial Bowl aspect of the game is rarely mentioned. Not all recaps are available but the last mention I have found of it after a quick search was in 1987. That's too bad, being that the trophy itself dates back to the 1800s.

I became curious as to its origins. The first article above mentions that it was donated by the city in honour of five straight ORFU championships. That could be true but if so, I have yet to locate the actual report of such an offering, if such a report even exists. 

I did find out that there was a dispute following what was Ottawa's fifth Ontario Rugby Football Union championship, earned by defeating Queen's in 1889. If my understanding is sound, Ottawa was asked to travel to neutral sites to defend its title and refused to do so for a number of reasons.

The Ottawa Journal copied commentary from other papers a few days later to illustrate and reinforce that Ottawa was in the right to refuse any other challenges, or at least that their position was a reasonable one. 

Good point. A team could send its scrubs to get hammered following your first challenge, then challenge a second time and force that game to a neutral site by the rule at the time. You could conceivably remove home field advantage from a team and send your top performers to play them on "neutral" ground. To use Toronto as an example, playing in Kingston might not be home game for them, but it's a hell of a lot closer to being one than playing in Ottawa. Clever!

It would seem then that Ottawa meant business and turned the trophy over. Then this appeared in the November 25th Journal.

Well that was nice of them! 

Is this what almost a century later became the Robert Lancaster trophy? Perhaps. It's difficult to know for sure. What we do know is that Ottawa College did follow through with its intentions of leaving the ORFU and an era of success came to an end over a rule that was too easy to abuse.