Saints football marching past 100 years
The past and present of St. Catharines Collegiate football will be on full display Saturday, May 20 as part of the high school’s 100th anniversary celebrations.
Current players and coaches will be on hand to provide tours to alumni and others of the school’s football facilities.
“We are inviting people to come see our space, look at the different decade tributes, go into our new locker room, players lounge and see our new game film area,” Collegiate head coach Nathan Greene said. “It will be a chance to talk about their memories of Collegiate football and why it was important to them.”
The nine different decade tributes — the 1920s and 1930s were combined into one tribute — are a sight to behold and are located on the walls outside the new locker room. The tributes are basically collages of newspaper clippings and photos from the St. Catharines Standard assembled by Greene and others.
A few of the more modern era collages contain actual clippings from The Standard but most are photocopies made from microfiche of the Standard found at the St. Catharines library.
Greene, Rebecca Farnsworth, Lanore Campbell and Greene’s mom, Carole Greene, spent an average of two and a half hours gathering clippings for each of the 100 years of Collegiate football.
“We started back last August and we did it piece meal whenever we had extra time,” Nathan Greene said. “You try and narrow down the dates and it is a needle in the hay stack but it is intuitive and you get better at it.”
Greene could go on for hours about all the fascinating tidbits of history about Collegiate football that started with the nickname Tri-Colours and became the Saints in the 1950s.
“I talked to some of the veteran guys and they told me they had to change it from Tri-Colours because they were being teased and called the Tricklers,” he said, with a laugh. “Kids are kids whether it is 1950 or 2023.”
Among the most notable clippings were: the 20 or 30 championship teams, including the last one in 1993 led by Jason Luke; stories detailing Bobby Hull and Stan Mikita playing football for Collegiate; and, Collegiate competing in the mid-season Red Feather tournament and playing in the final in front of more than 10,000 fans at the CNE.
Greene has PDF files for every Collegiate football game covered by the Standard and links to the games covered by BP Sports Niagara from 1923 to the present. There are plans to attach the database to the Collegiate alumni website and possibly the school website.
Obviously, people can see it up close and personal on May 20.
“I want to encourage everyone to come and see this because we can’t talk about all the great stories that we have,” Greene said.
The open house and reunion runs from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. followed by off-site celebrations at the Mansion House and the Imperial Veterans Club.
Greene can’t wait to show what the present of Collegiate football looks like.
“We have really worked hard from a grassroots perspective in trying to provide all the benefits that a football player would want to have and set up a culture that is going to sustain us for the long haul,” he said. “Having that culture and having that team dynamic based upon family is a cornerstone that will always see you through good times and bad times.”
That approach has been crucial in the past six or seven years when there were times when it looked like the Collegiate football program would cease to exist.
“We tore things down at that point and decided this is where we are going to focus on.”
The first step was the construction of the school’s fitness centre, spearheaded by football assistant coach Lori White and opened in 2019.
“From there, we focused on the younger players on the team, telling them that they would be the future leaders and that we would work with them,” Greene said. “With this 100th reunion, it has been a real benefit to us in the sense the kids can walk through these hallways and see that they part of something bigger than themselves. They are on the shoulders of 100 years of football history. They are going to benefit from all the generosity that our alumni has provided to us and it is their turn to run with the football.”
The generosity provided by the alumni and the tireless work of Greene and others has seen the construction of: a new locker room with individual pro-style, locker stalls for each player; a players lounge where players can hang out during and after school; a game film theatre; a trainer’s room and laundry facility; and, a change room for the female players on the team.
The Saints will begin their season in the fall on their new turf field which boasts the largest scoreboard in the District School Board of Niagara
“We have been working hard in the fitness centre since before Christmas and there has been a dedicated group of between 10 to 12,” Greene said. “It’s every day, Monday though Friday. Some of them have even committed to getting a membership in a gym for the summer.”
Informal spring practices started two weeks ago and are run three times a week. Between 14 and 18 Grade 9 to 11 players are out at each practice. There are also plans to hold summer training and possibly run joint practices with other DSBN football programs followed by a full training camp the week before school starts.
Wins have been few and far between for the Saints in the past several years but Greene feels all the steps being taken are going to turn that around.
“The goal is to be competitive right away. We have been putting in the work and sometimes it is baby steps but I really see the time we are spending now as money in the bank for next season,” he said. “I am completely confident it is going to show up on the scoreboard, at minimum we will have more competitive games and hopefully it will produce wins this year. That is always the goal.”
The whole process is a labour of love for Greene.
“I used to play a lot of golf but this is now my hobby. This is what I do with my extra time and I don’t see it as a chore,” he said. “I enjoy spending time with my players and I see them as an extension of my family as my pseudo-children.”
He is now coaching players who are the children of players he used to coach.
“They still call me coach Greene and it is still a big deal to them. Now I have the benefit of coaching their children and I enjoy sharing my time with youth and trying to provide a little bit of the advantages I received from great people like Walt Oprzedek and Gary England.”
