HIGH ACHIEVERS: Heritage Jersey Game celebrates 100th anniversary of Ottawa’s first-ever national men’s basketball championship

By Martin Cleary

When you think of the Rideau Canoe Club, these images immediately come to mind – a large and powerful Canadian flatwater canoe and kayak racing program, Ottawa Sport Hall of Fame inductees Sue Holloway and Dr. Renn Crichlow and 25-year club commodore Mike Scott.

But turn the clock back a full century from today and you’ll find what we know as a single-sport club was actually a multi-sport operation with each activity lasting three months to allow athletes to experience different sports.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the Rideau Aquatic Club, as it was known back then, was home to athletes in tennis, baseball, football, hockey and basketball as well as paddling.

Leo Doyle, the founder of the Ottawa Basketball Network, will turn the clock back next month to revisit the year of 1925. On Dec. 3, Doyle is staging the Heritage Jersey Game to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Rideau Aquatic Club winning its first-ever Dominion Amateur Basketball Association national men’s senior basketball championship.

Since all the players on the Rideaus basketball team attended Lisgar Collegiate Institute, the anniversary game will be held in its gymnasium on 29 Lisgar Street at 4 p.m. A 100th anniversary banner also will be hung in the Lisgar gym.

There will be an exhibition wheelchair basketball game at halftime to profile the 2026 IWBF world championships, which are being held in Ottawa and organized by Wheelchair Basketball Canada Sept. 9-19.

The players on the current Lisgar Lords boys’ senior basketball team will assume the identity of the Rideaus from 100 years ago and will go head-to-head against Lisgar basketball alumni, who will morph into the UBC team.

Xeist Teamwear has created replica jerseys to reflect the spirit of the game. The Rideaus will wear the purple retro jersey, while the UBC (Lisgar alumni) team will have white retro tops. (Purple has remained the singlet colour for competitive racers at the Rideau Canoe Club.)

Relatives of players from the 1925 national men’s senior championship team have been invited to the Heritage Jersey Game, including family members of James Naismith, the Almonte, ON, physical education instructor who invented the game in 1891 at Springfield, Massachusetts.

The Rideaus were the youngest team competing for the 1925 national men’s senior championship. They defeated Montreal AAA and St. John Trojans to qualify for the national final against the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

The national championship series was a two-game, total-point affair in late April of that year. The Rideaus won the first game and held a 10-point advantage entering the second game. UBC captured the second game by eight points, but it wasn’t enough to please the hometown crowd as the Rideaus escaped with a 38-36 victory.

City of Ottawa Mayor John P. Balharrie sent the Rideaus a telegram of congratulations and later presented the team with $200 to help cover their travel and accommodation costs. Two hundred dollars in 1925 would be worth about $3,500 today based on average inflation.

The Rideaus travelled across Canada by train and stopped in the Manitoba capital for a pre-championship match against the Manitoba Toilers. It ended in a 22-22 draw. On the return trip to Ottawa, the Rideaus had a rough encounter with a team from Kamloops, B.C., and had to cancel their game against Edmonton because of player injuries.

The Heritage Jersey Game could have assumed another level of authenticity if James Derouin, the head coach of the University of Ottawa Gee-Gees men’s basketball team, had more time to rally the UBC men’s team to come to Ottawa for the game. Before joining the Gee-Gees in 2010, Derouin was an assistant men’s basketball coach at UBC for two years.

Doyle is passionate about basketball in Ottawa, whether he’s supporting the youth game on the Ottawa Shooting Stars’ board of directors, serving as a member of the Eastern Ontario Basketball Committee, watching university games, staging a basketball summit or devising a walking tour of Ottawa to reflect on the city’s basketball history and heritage.

At a recent social event, Doyle was talking to Peter Charbonneau, whose father Albert (Ab) played on the Rideaus 1925 national championship team. Doyle didn’t realize it was 100 years ago the Rideau Aquatic Club had posted its surprise victory.

He took that nugget of information and developed it into another opportunity to spread the word about Ottawa’s rich basketball culture, which includes the championship runs by the Carleton University Ravens men’s and women’s teams, Olympic athletes like Shawn Swords, Donna Hobin, Marial Shayok and Courtnay Pilypaitis and local high school and community club teams winning provincial championships.

“It’s community building,” Doyle said in a phone interview this week about why he decided to create the Heritage Jersey Game. “It’s getting the story out there. We did some great things in the past and we must share the story.

“We want to use the sport to raise the profile of basketball. It’s using the sport to think about the people. They are interesting stories about people who lived in our community.”

Doyle added in a press release: “This anniversary is more than a sports milestone. It’s a celebration of Ottawa’s rightful place in Canadian basketball history.”

Doyle loves to promote basketball in a variety of ways and isn’t afraid to drive the basket against a taller defender.

“Whatever crazy, insane idea you have, you have to put it out there,” he said.

Here are the rosters from the 1925 Canadian men’s senior basketball championship teams:

RIDEAU AQUATIC CLUB

Don Young (cousin of basketball inventor James Naismith, 1925 Grey Cup champion with the Ottawa Senators), Eric Nichol (played three sports at Queen’s University), Albert T. Charbonneau (1925 Rideau Aquatics Club champion in war canoe), Alexander (Boots) Smith (1927 Stanley Cup champion with the Ottawa Senators), John Cameron (Jake) Jamieson (1925 Grey Cup champion with the Ottawa Senators), Edwin Godwin (1925 Rideau Aquatics Club champion in war canoe), Lyle Manuel Laishley, John Eric Kilpatrick, Sidney Day Cook (1925 Rideau Aquatics Club champion in war canoe), John Orville (Orrie) Hodgkin (Ottawa Rough Riders’ game timer), Hervey Matheson Boyd (co-founder of the Dominion Amateur Basketball Association, which is Canada Basketball today), club president Wesley Ernest Gowling (founding commodore of the Rideau Aquatic Club, and namesake of W.E. Gowling Public School), manager W.C. Sebright (Zebe) Gamble (Ottawa Rough Riders coach in the late 1920s) and Arthur Burridge (coach).

UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA

Dal Grauer, Harold Reynolds Henderson, Arnold Henderson (coach of the Edmonton Grads, the most successful women’s basketball team in Canada), Al Buchanan, James Dadwell Hartley, Wallace Swansey Peck, Tommy George Wilkinson, Fred Ellis Newcombe, Heileman Osborne Arkley and Ross Bryson (coach).