Senior football players of the Alderwood Collegiate Institute Auggies after winning the 1963 City championship, the ‘Super Bowl’ for high school students.
A reunion was held as members of the Alderwood Collegiate Institute Auggies senior football team celebrated their 1963 city-wide championship victory.
About 17 players, all in their late 70s and 80s, of the now-gone Alderwood Collegiate Institute, on Valermo Drive, marked the 61st anniversary of their Toronto District Intercollegiate Athletic Association football championship led by Coach by Carl Yamikoff, 92, and the late Richard Howe.
Another shot of the members of the Alderwood Collegiate Institute Auggies seniors football team who won the 1963 championship.
The June 10 reunion was held at the Village of Humber Heights Retirement Home, on Lawrence Avenue West, where Yamikoff and his wife, Beatrice, are both residents. He became a high school teacher, Department Head, Vice-principal, Principal and Superintendent of the Etobicoke Board of Education, now the Toronto District School Board (TDSB).
“It was a great event to see the coach and other players,” said David Grainger, 79, who was then 17 and played as a flanker and defensive half-back for the Auggies. “We have been having a reunion for years and have lost a few players over time.”
Alderwood Collegiate Institute operated for 28 years before it was demolished in 2014. It is now a townhouse complex.
It was the “most outstanding” team in all of his years of coaching many sports at several high schools as a teacher and administrator in the Etobicoke Board of Education,” Yakimoff told his surviving players.
Grainger said the team played with determination and in the spirit of their motto “All for One and One for All,” despite opposition from many directions.
“The players were striving to improve the “good,” then the “better,” in each of them to become the “best” team on the field,” he recalled.
This townhouse complex is now on the site of the former Etobicoke Collegiate Institute, whose survivors are calling for a marker to remember the school.
Late coach Howe said at the time “football is a team game and this group of young men played as a real team”
Grainger said the Auggies played in the 1963 finals against Mississauga’s Gordon Graydon Memorial Secondary School and won the championship 13 to 7 in a tough game that went to double overtime at Varsity Stadium in Toronto.
“The Auggies ended a very hard fought tight game by winning in the final seconds of the second overtime sudden death period with a touch down,” he recalled.
A former 40-year teacher, Grainger said it was one of the biggest victories for Alderwood Collegiate in its 28-year history.
It just so happens that James Yurichuk, a famed football player for the Toronto Argonauts and B.C. Lions live on the site of the former school.
“It was the Super Bowl for Toronto and area high school students,” he recalled.
The 1,000-student school was built in 1955 and shut in 1983 due to declining enrolment.
The property was sold to a developer by the Etobicoke Board of Education, and demolished in 2014 and is now a townhouse complex.
Grainger said the school produced exceptional athletes, many who went on to play for the National Lacrosse League, the Canadian Football League (CFL) with the Montreal Alouettes and Toronto Argonauts and National Hockey League (NHL) teams as St. Louis Blues, Los Angeles Kings, Minnesota North Stars and Edmonton Oilers.
An old news clipping of the famous 1963 Auggies victory.
The surviving players have been calling for a marker, plaque or even benches to be installed on a park at the housing complex to remember their school and the athletes and professionals it produced.
“Today you would never know Alderwood Collegiate stood on that site due to the housing,” he said. “It is a shame and the school and students should be remembered somehow.”
Grainger said a submission was made for the team to be inducted into the Etobicoke Sports Hall of Fame with no luck.
He players are hoping for a memorial before they all pass on and so much history is forgotten.