1931, Oct 5th: "Gladstones Surprise Rough Riders To Win, 13-6"

Not THOSE Rough Riders. 

This partial article from the Ottawa Citizen summarizes one of three junior games played that day. It was the first weekend of action for the league as a whole, as it launched that year. 

I'll have summaries of the other two games played that day in separate posts. 

A portion of this article was used in a post on this blog a couple of years back in which I attempted to nail down the guy who threw the first-ever forward pass for an Ottawa team. Since this was the league's first year of operation, this Art Crain dude is likely the first to do it at the junior level.

There were two other games played that day, including St. Patrick's College vs Rangers, which started at the same time as the Gladstone / Ottawas match. Crain still seems likely to be the man, as his passing prowess appears to have taken place during the first quarter. We'll likely never know for sure, but a strong argument can be made for him.

Nov 18th, 1931: "Burghs Finally Win"

Everyone deserves their day in the sun. When researching sports history, it's easy to be focused on the great accomplishments like championship victories, record-setting performances, first-time events, etc.

I enjoy coming across that unexpected moment of glory. I feel for anyone going through a winless season and therefore find stories like the one below enjoyable.

The Junior City League page is getting some additions today. Its first season, in 1931, culminated with St. Patrick's narrowly besting Gladstone by a score of 02-01 in the championship game. The summary for that contest has been added to the league's page above but I'll instead draw some attention to a late-season game in which New Edinburgh pulled out its first victory after an 0-6 start. They could have tanked like the Rangers team apparently did but played through and were rewarded for it. Good for them. 

1937: New Edinburgh Rough Riders Clinch JCFL Championship Against...No One.

For the most part, the smaller amateur local leagues that emerged between the 1920s and 1960s tended to lack real competitiveness. Often, one team was particularly dominant and pulled away from the pack in no time.

The 1937 Junior City Football League season was a relatively rare exception. It turned into two-horse race that unfortunately thudded out at the end. Check out the final standings. 

New Edinburgh beat St. Pat's in game two but an upset loss to Gladstone by New Edinburgh opened the door for St. Patrick's to sneak back into the race. And, as you would hope as a spectator, it all came to a head in the final weekend of the regular season!

First, St. Patrick's defeated Gladstone which put them in first place with their 13 points in the standings.

St. Patrick's then had to stand back and pray for a miracle in which Strathcona, they of the 17 points scored in eight games to that point, would upset the strong New Edinburgh club.

Strathcona didn't put up a fight at all. Literally. They refused to play. And with the game having been moved to St. Patrick's field, the team wishing for a miracle instead got to watch New Edinburgh score a touchdown unopposed and in doing so, even bump one of their players from the scoring title. Harsh!

The player bumped in that scoring race, by the way, was Johnny Quilty, son of Hall of Fame member Silver Quilty. 

The whole episode comes off like a bit of a dick move but New Edinburgh had defeated St. Patrick's twice during the regular season and tied with them once. St. Patrick's ended with a 6-2-1 record as a result.

It's hard to argue that New Edinburgh didn't deserve first place and wouldn't have secured it anyway by defeating toothless Strathcona, a team they'd clobbered twice already by a combined score of 33-00, with that much at stake.

But if you were a St. Patrick's man at the time, that still had to sting. 😬

The 1939 Gladstones: Your First Interprovincial Junior Football Champions

There's a new page above called (for the moment) "Rough Rider Seasons (1907 - 1925). Most of the teams featured here have their results, coaching history, awards, etc. all included on the same page but there is so much content with the Rough Riders that it has to be separated. Of course, I plan to include seasons prior 1907 and right up to the sad end in 1996 but that is the chunk of time that I have carved out as of this writing.

Needing a break from that, I went back to a Junior City League (1931+) page I'd started but had yet to complete. In building it, for most years, I'd started by finding and posting the announcement of which teams would be participating in the coming season. I had managed to do this from the period between 1931 and 1938 and had stopped there, so last night I decided forge ahead a little more and in doing so found what I believe to be a little-known accomplishment by a local club.

The city league only had three teams in 1939. Each would play the other two twice each. Gladstone, defending champs from 1938 and coached by former Rough Rider Arnie Morrison, sealed up the three-team division on October 21st with a game left to play. They would defeat an Air Force team the following weekend in an  exhibition game, win their final regular season the week after that, then wait to hear about playing a Quebec champion in an Eastern junior football playoff semi-final.

That champion would turn out to be Montreal's Westmount team. Westmount had defeated Gladstone in the 1938 playoffs in Montreal but Gladstone got the better of them this time around at Lansdowne. 

That led to an Eastern junior football championship contest against the Hamilton Italo-Canadians which Gladstone also won. I know very little about the HIC but it seems they'd won a Toronto/Hamilton junior league, similar to how Ottawa won their own city league. 

Here's our hero now.

Gladstone subsequently (almost immediately, in fact) received a challenged from a team from Sarnia, winners of the Ontario Rugby Football Union, but that match never came to pass. The Gladstone/Hamilton game took place on December 2nd so it was already late in the year to organize additional games, then the two organizations could not come to an agreement on who would cover certain expenses. Also, the Interprovincial Rugby Union already recognized only Gladstone as junior champions so Ottawa ultimately had nothing to gain from playing another game.

That IRFU recognition was a new accomplishment for a team from the area.  

So the Sooners were not the first Ottawa team to reach the top of the junior level. A true national championship may not have been feasible for Gladstone but Arnie Morrison's squad achieved the highest level of success of the time, better than all that preceded them locally.

1934: Jr. Rough Riders 09, Strathconas 02

Ottawa's presence in the junior QRFU came to an end in 1929 but junior football did not disappear altogether, it just took a year off. A local six-team league was formed in 1931 called the City Junior Rugby Football League, or some variation thereof (media was inconsistent in its naming).  

A page was recently built and added to the banner above to record that league's progression. Actually, "progression" might not be the right term, the league quickly shrank to operate with only three or four teams, but it did last longer than I expected. I believed it might have run all of three to five seasons but it carried on in some form until at least 1941. 

1934 got the bulk of the attention this afternoon (before I noticed I totally skipped over 1933). This was a three-team season, Jr. Rough Riders, Strathcona, and New Edinburgh, two of which would play a "curtain raiser" before the "senior" Rough Riders games. 

The game below was something of an exception, I believe. Strathcona had played on October 6th then played this one on October 8th. 

The junior Rough Riders won the league that year. The recap to their final game states that they would wait to find out whether they'd play a team from another league in some sort of regional playoff but aside from what appeared to be an exhibition game against Smiths Falls Collegiate, I have not located an actual playoff contest.