“You could win every game of the season but one and it was a failure, just as you could win but one and it was a success.”
— Carm Cozza, legendary former Yale football coach on the Harvard game.
It turns out coach Cozza could just as well have been speaking about a game north of the border.
“The Queen’s game is no different,” legendary former Western University football coach Greg Marshall told me.
Western’s current coach, Michael Faulds, says there is nothing quite like the Western-Queen’s rivalry.
“Anytime we play Queen’s the adrenaline is, well, it’s just not like anything else,” he said.
Faulds will lead the Western University Mustangs into battle in the 118th Yates Cup this Saturday in Kingston, Ont., against the hometown Queen’s University Gaels.
The winner will be crowned the Ontario universities champion and advance to the national semi-finals.
No rivalry in Canadian university sport carries the cultural weight, historical baggage and sheer competitive force of Queen’s and Western.
“Queen’s and Western share so much in common: they are roughly the same distance from Toronto, and many of the graduates of both schools populate board rooms, law courts and medical theatres — not just in the GTA but well beyond,” said Faulds.
“When you sign up to play sports at either one, especially football, you learn the lore about the rivalry pretty quickly.”
Western teammate Donnovan Bennett, now a broadcaster, concurred:
“Like a lot of kids, I was recruited by both schools, and it was frankly surprising to me that the Queen’s coaches were slagging Western before you even decided which place you were going to play,” said Bennet.
“I grasped pretty quickly this was intense.”
Queen’s Head Coach Steve Snyder is no stranger to the rivalry. He served on the coaching staff at Western before arriving in Kingston in 2019.
I asked Snyder about his favourite Queen’s-Western moment.
“Earlier this year, [playing Western in] London, my hometown, and watching our team play a great game and take them down on the road,” he said.
The largely residential composition of the universities’ student bodies makes on-campus Saturday afternoon football games meaningful to people at both schools.
The players, their coaches, and the families will live and die with every tackle, touchdown and imprecation for a few transcendent hours.
In the match up’s current iteration, the Gaels are clear favourites. They are the defending Yates Cup champions, having upset Laurier University last year. And they are playing at home, thanks to their regular season win over Western. Their squad is also the generally older, stronger team.
“Up front, Queen’s are ahead, for sure,” Bennett told me. “Really they were one year early when they beat Laurier on the road in last year’s final.
“Now they are ripe at the top of the cycle and this time should be their time.”
However, a rivalry game has an inner calculus that, time and again, leads to improbable outcomes. Western are underdogs, but they are not that far behind and no one would be surprised if they pulled off the road upset.
“The moment will not be too big for our players,” Faulds assured me.
Saturday’s kickoff between Western and Queen’s is at 1 p.m. Eastern in the relatively rarified climes of Kingston’s refurbished Richardson Stadium.
The game may or may not be a sellout, although it’s a pretty good bet you could show up half an hour beforehand and get a ticket. There will be no network coverage, but hard-core fans can follow the action on OUA live stream.
After the hurly burly’s done, you will not find the results on main line websites and the final score will be hard to find except a small bit in the scores section of newspapers and websites.
But for those far from the madding crowd of big leaguers like the Leafs, Raptors and the NFL, the result is as findable as it is meaningful.
Just ask anyone from Queen’s or Western.
