Football Footprint

The first organized rugby practice was held on Saturday, Oct. 22, and after a week's work together the team engaged in a practice match with the Eskimos, Edmonton's senior aggregation. The score was unfortunately lost, but all present declared it to be a close and hard fought game with the final result slightly in favor of the Eskimos.

-From The Gateway, Nov. 21, 1910

It's been a hundred years since the University of Alberta Golden Bears football program began in 1910 as a rugby team with William Muir Edwards as the head coach. However, the football field has sometimes lay fallow, like it did from 1916 through 1918 while the players were doing their duty fighting on the Western Front during the First World War. With the end of the war came the return of football in 1919 under coach York Blayney, '12 BA. But it still wasn't called "football."

The first official listing of the team as exclusively a "football" team (the terms "rugby" and "football" were still being used interchangeably by The Gateway) appeared in the 1948 edition of the Evergreen and Gold yearbook.

But just one year after officially becoming "football," in 1949 there was, once again, no football team. The U of A football program would remain in mothballs from 1949 through 1958 simply because there was no one to compete against in the West. And since the team had no use for their jerseys, they donated them to the CFL's Edmonton Eskimos who have continued the tradition of wearing green and gold to this day.

Maury Van Vliet, '79 LLD (Honorary) - the U of A's first dean of the Faculty of Physical Education - brought the game back in 1959 as the Golden Bears joined the Western Intercollegiate Football League. Since then the Golden Bears have made six appearances in the Vanier Cup game to decide supremacy in Canadian Interuniversity Sport and have won the Cup three times.

Although coach Gino Fracas, '57 Dipl(Ed), '58 BEd, would be the first to take the Golden Bears to the Vanier Cup game in Toronto against U of T in 1965, it would be coach Clare Drake, '58 BEd, '95 LLD (Honorary), who would see the team finally win the national championship two years later, also in Toronto, but against Hamilton's McMaster University. (Of course, Drake is also known as the winningest coach in university hockey history, winning 697 games, six national championships and 17 Canada West conference titles. He was also a co-coach of Canada's 1980 Olympic hockey team.)

Under coach Jim Donlevy, '59 BPE, '61 BEd, '75 MA, the Bears won two Vanier Cups, the first in 1972 and their last in 1980. During the team's 30-year drought since last winning the Vanier Cup, the Bears once again faced not being able to field a team in 1990, when funding became so precarious that then-athletic director Dale Schulha, '72 BPE, '74 MSc, '74 Dipl(Ed) - who had thrown a touchdown pass in the 1972 Vanier Cup - was faced with a difficult decision: cut the football program or eliminate four or five other team sports. Fortunately the Alumni Association stepped in with a "Save The Bears" campaign that ending up raising about $300,000 - enough to keep the Bears on the field for the next two years and the return of better times.

The Golden Bears made it to the playoffs last year and hope to finish in the top two in the Canada West conference so that they can host a playoff game this year. "With returning quarterback Julian Marchand, along with defensive leader Craig Gerbrandt, and three-time All-Canadian kicker Hugh O'Neill all back this season - along with 38 other returning players - the timing is good for this team to accomplish that goal," says U of A Athletics Sports Information Director Matt Gutsch.