All Posts Tagged With: "maclean’s university rankings sports"

An unscientific guide to the best and worst in university sports

Top overall

The University of Western Ontario. Last year, the Mustangs won nine OUA (Ontario University Athletics) championships and both the men’s and the women’s national rowing titles, and made it to the final in both football and men’s hockey, and the semifinal in men’s basketball. “There’s a real sports culture at Western,” says Rob Pettapiece, who writes about the Canadian Interuniversity Sports (CIS) league for the CIS Blog—and plenty of jock alum are willing to support the team, in spite of the purple uniforms.

Honourable mention: The UBC Thunderbirds—whose hockey teams now play out of an Olympic venue—have won back-to-back national titles in women’s volleyball, three of the previous six national championships in women’s basketball and 22 of the past 24 national swimming championships. For the past four years, they have been ranked top 10 in basketball, volleyball, soccer, swimming and field hockey, and every couple of years pick up a national title in either soccer or men’s volleyball. While other schools tend to dominate individual sports, UBC spreads its big sports budget widely. Attendance, however, is consistently pathetic.

Honourable mention: University of Alberta, whose men’s and women’s hockey and volleyball teams tend to dominate the Canada West division. Alberta, a traditional powerhouse, has won national titles in every team sport. It consistently fields a bad football team, though—just a warm-up for the real sports, they say in Edmonton.

Top football
Laval University—no contest. Defending national champions the Rouge et Or have won five Vanier Cups in the last 10 years. Laval boasts 18,000 fans per game at PEPS stadium, which recently underwent a $2-million refit. (Western, by comparison, draws 11,000 to its homecoming games.) The program, overseen by ultra-successful head coach Glen Constantin, is flush with cash, and is treated like a pro franchise. It has invested in full-time assistant coaches, with an investors board made up of Quebec business people, and the team goes to Florida for training camp.

Top men’s hockey
In Canada, university hockey plays second fiddle to junior leagues, but the University of New Brunswick Varsity Reds, who have claimed two of the last three national championships, boast a stellar program. Last season, they beat reigning NCAA champions Boston College, whose lineup featured 11 NHL draft choices. UNB standout Rob Hennigar, the Varsity Reds all-time points leader, made the unlikely step from CIS (Canadian Interuniversity Sport) to the NHL, inking a contract with the New York Islanders in 2008.

Top women’s hockey

Back-to-back CIS national champs, the McGill Martlets—who haven’t lost a game in almost two years, dating back to a 2-1 shootout loss to Alberta on Dec. 30, 2007—are the rising women’s hockey powerhouse. Goaltender Charlie Labonte and defenceman Catherine Ward both play for the women’s national team. Martlets head coach Peter Smith is assistant coach of the Olympic national team (previously head coach of the under-21 women’s national team).

Expect McGill’s dominance to continue. Two years ago, the team received a landmark $1-million donation—the biggest ever to a university women’s sports program in Canada. So it’s flush, and has a strong coach with an eye on the country’s top young talent. Smith’s recruiting job isn’t difficult: the appeal of playing for a winning team while surrounded by everything a McGill education and downtown Montreal has to offer is tough to turn down.

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