Football History

History // All-Time Stats // Team Awards // Queen's Football Hall of Fame

HISTORY
For generations of students, Saturday afternoon football games at Richardson Stadium have been a fall ritual. The game was first played in a rudimentary form at Queen’s in the late 1870s and has been a tradition at Queen’s ever since.

The first games were informal matches of “Association Football [soccer] with catching. Then, in 1882, two brothers from Ottawa, Fred and Jackson Booth, introduced Queen’s athletes to the game of “rugby football,” an older version of modern rugby and the game from which football at Queen’s evolved. The game was referred to as rugby football until well into this century and was quite different from the modern game of football. It was not until the 1930s, for example, that the now-crucial element of forward passing was permitted.

Up until the 1930s, Queen’s teams played not just against university teams, but against the best football squads in the country. They often did so with spectacular success.

Queen’s won its first national rugby football championship in 1893 and, in the early 1920s, its teams were virtually unbeatable. Led by Canadian hall-of-famers Harry “Red” Batsone and Frank “Pep” Leadley, Queen’s won consecutive Grey Cups in 1922, 1923, and 1924 and went undefeated for a stretch of 26 games.

An indication of Queen’s strength was the score of the 1923 final, in which Queen’s beat the Regina Roughriders 54-0. Shortly after these triumphs, the big-city teams took over the game and universities restricted themselves to intercollegiate play.

Queen’s played for years in a league with traditional rivals McGill, University of Toronto, and Western. But the growing number of universities in central Canada led to realignment and Queen’s played in the Ontario-Quebec Intercollegiate Football Conference (OQIFC) from 1980 to 2001. Subsequently, due to realignment changes, the Gaels shifted back into the Ontario Universities Association (OUA) conference in 2001.

Overall, since the founding of the first intercollegiate league in 1898, the team has won numerous conference titles. Since the first national intercollegiate championship was played in 1959, Queen’s has won four Canadian titles (1968, 1978, 1992, 2009).

Many Queen’s players have gone on to play in professional leagues. Among the most notable since the 1950s have been CFL great Ron Stewart, a star for Ottawa in the 1950s and 1960s as well as Mike Schad, one of the few Canadian-trained players drafted in the first round by the National Football League (fourth overall in 1986).

CHAMPIONSHIPS

League Championships	National Championships
Ontario Rugby Football Union (ORFU) - 2 1893, 1894	Canadian Rugby Union (CRU) Dominion Champions - Grey Cup - 4 1893, 1922, 1923, 1924
Yates Cup (OUAA, OUA) - 23 1900, 1904, 1922, 1923, 1924, 1925, 1927, 1929, 1930, 1934, 1935, 1937, 1955, 1956, 1961, 1963, 1964, 1966, 1968, 1970, 1977 (east), 1978 (east), 1979 (east)*, 2009	Vanier Cup (CIAU, CIS) - 4 1968, 1978, 1992, 2009
Dunsmore Cup (OQIFC) - 7 1981, 1983, 1984, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1997**	Bowl Games (CIAU, CIS) - 5 Atlantic Bowl 1978 Churchill Bowl/Mitchell Bowl 1968, 1983, 1992, 2009

*Queen’s 1979 Yates Cup title is officially uncredited by the OUA. The east and west divisions of the O-QIFC functioned as separate leagues in from 1974 to 1979, and each held its own championship. Queen’s won the 1979 Eastern Division title, but lost to the Western division champion (Western), in a CIAU Semi-Final, which the league declared to be the Yates Cup game as well. As a result, the 1979 team is listed as a league champion but the championship is not counted toward Queen’s Yates Cup total.

**Queen’s was declared the 1997 OQIFC champions after Ottawa defaulted for the use of ineligible players.

ALL-TIME STATS TEAM AWARDS

QUEEN'S FOOTBALL HALL OF FAME