The 1961 Senior High School Semis

1982: Laurentian 19, Ridgemont 07

The 1982 Carleton Board championship was posted earlier today, here's the Ottawa Board championship in which Laurentian earned the right to meet J.S. Woodsworth for the city crown.

The 1964 Laurentian High School Senior Team

Over the past few days, I've worked on adding far more detail to the high school page. Most seasons included little more than the championship game's score and a brief summary, but I'm now working from 1927 up to the present to add regular season results for the eventual champion, as well as playoff scores for the league. 

1964 got the bulk of the attention this morning. Photography in the local newspapers began to improve around this time so the images displayed with the articles tend to be easier to copy. We have a couple of examples below involving the eventual champion Laurentian. 

Joe Upton is back coaching the Laurentian senior football team. Upton, a former Rough Rider star lineman, took ill a few years back and had to take things easy. But he feels fine now and is anxiously awaiting the start of the senior league schedule. In the picture with Upton are, back row, left to right, Jim Foley and Doug Smith. Kneeling in front is Mark Ciavaglia. 

The above is from the September 22nd Ottawa Journal. The picture below is from two days later, but appeared in the Ottawa Citizen.

Upton was a former Rough Rider but Foley was a future one. The team drafted him in the first round, ninth overall, in 1969. He played for Montreal for a couple of years but finally joined the Rough Riders in 1973 and played through to the 1977 season inclusively, winning two Grey Cups along the way. He is a member of the Ottawa Sports Hall of Fame.

In the image below, sporting a different number, Foley is getting some instruction from Upton during the Western semi-final game in November against Rideau.

The mention of Upton's illness in the first picture casts a bit of a shadow on that otherwise happy occasion. Upton had suffered a heart attack during a game in 1961 and while the caption states that he was feeling great, he would succumb to a heart seizure at only 42 years of age in 1967. His obituary appeared in the March 2nd Citizen that year.

One of several articles about his passing included the November 1964 image above as an illustration of Upton "in happier times". No doubt that's true, as they won the championship that year. They would win it under Upton's guidance as well in 1965 and, as if to honour his impact on the program, in 1967 following his passing.

Just Added: The 1970 Laurentian Team Picture

And here it is for your viewing pleasure.  It was included in the November 14th Ottawa Journal, a few days after the championship game had actually been played. The game summary had already been located and posted.

I love that they included a roster though wish they'd given a numerical guide to identify who's who.

Either way, it's cool to see Bud MacRae's name on there. He's been mentioned on this blog in the past (and on the website that preceded it) as a great source of high school football info so coming across a little something about his playing days was a neat treat. 

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: Ridgemont's 1962 Results and Championship Game Recap

In continuing with my little mission to add much more info to the various past high school seasons, Ridgemont's been more or less randomly selected for the spotlight today.

The Spartans were not a dominant team in 1962. They entered the playoffs with a 4-2 record.

One of those losses game in the final game of the regular season against Fisher Park, who ended up being their semi-final round opponent.

They dispatched Fisher by a score of 14-06 then entered the final against the other team to which they lost in the regular season, Laurentian. They convincingly avenged that loss as well.  

Whither the Perley Trophy?

It is often the case that researching one subject will unexpectedly reveal some tiny detail which propels me onto my next search.

Yesterday, in the midst of writing the post about Ottawa Tech's late 40s/early 50s dominance, I came across the following portion of an article. It was written following Tech being toppled from the high school football throne by Glebe in 1951.

It was?

In a standard search for "Perley Trophy", I found an article by Martin Cleary for the Citizen from March of 2007. Someone else was searching for the trophy 13 years ago, a couple of decades after it was last handed out.

The article directed readers to a website which is no longer operational. It also included the following image.

This search also came up in an article by Rob Brodie for canoe.com in April 2007. It included something of an update on Mr. MacRea's "quest".

The search for the old trophy, which has a history that dates back to the 1930s, has been frustrating. MacRae...says he's "hit dead end after dead end," but isn't giving up yet. 

"I'm hoping," he said. "I don't know what will happen. It's a real nice trophy, almost the size of the Grey Cup, about three feet high." 

MacRae said if his quest comes up empty, "without a doubt" the current championship trophy will be rededicated to honour Graham and Wills. But he clearly hopes it doesn't come to that.

Then come November 2007, at least that much was confirmed in an uncredited story in the Citizen.

St. Mark will face Sir Wilfrid Laurier Lancers in the championship game on the Minto Sports Field at the Nepean Sportsplex. Game time is 7 p.m. It will be a battle of undefeated teams as the Lions and Lancers are 8-0 this year. 

This will be the 80th Ottawa high school senior football championship and the first one to present the inaugural Bob Wills and Ron Graham Cup to the winning team. The championship trophy has undergone a complete makeover, courtesy of an interested alumni group from the former Laurentian High School headed by Bud MacRae, who is a teacher at Bell High School. The new trophy is named after Bob Wills and Ron Graham, who coached at Laurentian for a quarter century and produced many successful teams.

So was the cup ever found? I would think that if it had been, it would have been a bigger part of the story in 2007.

I'm curious as to the Perley Trophy's story now because for as much as I've read about high school football in Ottawa, the name of the trophy didn't ring any bells.

I think that's a matter of the trophy being handed out well after the season, at least in some cases, rather than immediately after the game. This image appeared in the Citizen on December 10th, 1954, a couple of weeks after the championship was actually won.

Complicating matters, searches reveal a trophy of the same name being awarded to local baseball  and hockey teams and even women's curling champions. Also, the awarding of the trophy was not always reported in the sports section. It occasionally made its way into the local news instead. As a result, tracking it becomes quite tricky.

What we do know is that the trophy did come into play in 1931 but the first article above stating that it was intended to be used to recognize the winner of the Riders/Rangers game appears to be the accurate one. The first such game was played on November 11th, 1931.

In an article from the day before the game, Perley is referred to as a "well-known member of the Rough Riders executive". I believe he was later a Central Ward councilman.

I can not seem to locate other instances of the trophy serving to recognize a Riders/Rangers winner, but it pops up in a list of hardware handed out at an event at Ottawa Tech in 1937. Again, this is consistent with what is stated in the first article above.

After that, it is mentioned periodically, mostly in articles relating to a school event in which a number of trophies and awards are handed out. The last picture of it I've come across is from 1969...

...and the last significant mention of it, until Mr. Cleary's 2007 article, is from 1972 when St. Patrick and Fisher Park were forced to "share" the trophy as a result of their championship contest ending in a tie.

And that may be why the trophy went dormant, for lack of a better term. In 1973, for the first time, the city champion was determined by having the respective winners of the Ottawa and Carleton school boards meet. Perhaps a new playoff structure resulted in a new trophy being handed out. This 1978 celebration photo certainly seems to support the theory.

Whatever the case may be, I'm interested in its prior use as a "bragging rights" award between the Rough Riders and Rangers, similar to Pedro for the Panda Game between Ottawa U. and Carleton or the Old Boys Cup between Ashbury and Bishop's years ago. I hope to come across those results at some point.

Bud MacRae, by the way, is responsible for creating a list of high school champions dating back to 1927 that I used first for the Capital Region Football website I ran a few years ago then as the "skeleton" for the high school page on this site.

I've never met him; the list was given to me second-hand, but I've always hoped that he's seen me express my gratitude for that list. It was an invaluable starting point in tracking the history of football at that level in the region.