Sept. 13th, 1964: "Trojans Still Undefeated, Sooners Win Over Lions"

A few recaps from games played in the early 60s are being added to the IJFL page this morning and the ones displayed below will be linked to it shortly. Being that it is particularly informative, including standings, scoring summaries, etc., I thought is warranted a bit more prominence. It originally appeared in the following day's Ottawa Citizen. 

Dan Dever's name might jump out for some. He played with the Ottawa Rough Riders from 1968 to 1973, winning three Grey Cups along the way.  

The suggestion that injuries might prove costly to the Trojans was prophetic. They lost their two remaining regular season games then were skunked by the Sooners in a two-game playoff series to the tune of 57-13.

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: 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.

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: 1953 IJFL Championship Game Recap

The Interprovincial Junior Football League has its own page above and the following article from the November 2nd Ottawa Journal was added to it a few minutes ago.

The Citizen's recap is a bit more detailed, adding that the Don Spencer touchdown was a seven-yard plunge, Barry Craig's went for five yards around the end and Jim Hunter's pass to Brian Armstrong was a 25-yard connection. Armstrong's second score was "on a similar play".   

Eastview Golden Eagles Celebrate a Championship

New Plan.

This is a result of the "updates on updates" post a little earlier. Trying to remember all the recent updates and/or determining whether they were worth mentioning was a bit challenging and time-consuming so going forward I'll be posting updates pretty much as they happen. Some days you might end up with a half dozen posts, or we might go several days without one. A lot of the content might seem oddly random but at times, I find things when I wasn't looking for them.

Such is the case here. While filling out Ottawa U's 1966 season results, I'd happened across a victory celebration of that year's Eastview team.

The Golden Eagles are said to have won the Junior Interprovincial Football League title, referred to in the article as the JIHL for some reason (typo?), in defeating the Ottawa Sooners in a two-game series. The league did change names a few times and reporters didn't always seem particularly bothered to get it absolutely right.

For this site's purpose, the content is added to the IJFL page. I've seen the league called Interprovincial Junior Football League most often so that's what I go with.

Very little photography was displayed for that league in either paper at the time (Citizen and Journal) so I try to make use of whatever I come across.

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.

More Trojans: The Junior Version of 1964

Last night I was pleased to locate more information about a Trojans team that essentially launched the Midget level in Ottawa.

Today, we're going to find out more about a junior team that also bore that name and similarly kicked off their existence with an impressive victory over a defending champion.

These Trojans differ in that they were already established on some level but took on a new identity in joining the Interprovincial Junior Football League.

The Trojans defeated the Ottawa Sooners in their first game.

The name Dan Dever should be familiar, he won three Grey Cups with the Ottawa Rough Riders between 1968 and 1973.

The Trojans won five straight games at the start of the season but lost the final two of the regular season then got clobbered by the Sooners in a 2-game playoff series.

Aug 23rd: Trojans 13, Ottawa Sooners 06
Aug 30th: Trojans 12, Easton Chargers 07
Sep  6th: Trojans 32, Eastview Lions 00
Sep  9th: Trojans 28, Eastview Lions 00
Sep 13th: Trojans 19, Mont Royal Lions 06
Sep 20th: Trojans 16, Montreal NDG Maple Leafs 34
Sep 27th: Trojans 07, Ottawa Sooners 21 

Oct 11th: Trojans 00, Ottawa Sooners 19 (Div. Finals, Game 1)
Oct 18th: Trojans 13, Ottawa Sooners 38 (Div. Finals, Game 2) 

Unfortunately, the Trojans would never duplicate their early success. They struggled a great deal in 1965, going winless (0-8), and were out of the league before the start of the 1966 season.