All Posts Tagged With: "sports at university"
The winners, the losers
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.
Next: Top basketball teams, best rivalry, worst team name, blind arrogance and more
The bottom line
Figuring it out: Tuition rates vary considerably across Canada
In his teachings, the Greek philosopher Epictetus proclaimed: “Only the educated are free.” Unfortunately, an education isn’t. On average, undergraduate tuition fees across Canada increased by 3.6 per cent this year, the same percentage jump as last year. Ontario had the highest increase at five per cent, the maximum allowed by the provincial government, while British Columbia had the lowest increase at two per cent. Despite a 4.2 per cent increase, students at Quebec universities still pay among the lowest tuition in the country—as long as they are residents of the province. Meanwhile, Manitoba and Saskatchewan ended tuition freezes with increases of 4.3 per cent and 3.4 per cent respectively.
Tuition fees in New Brunswick and Newfoundland and Labrador remained unchanged, while in Nova Scotia, fees actually decreased by 3.1 per cent. Thanks to the implementation of the Nova Scotia University Student Bursary Trust in March 2008, fees for residents of the province will remain frozen until 2011. International students, who generally pay considerably higher tuition than Canadian students, saw their fees rise 7.1 per cent for an average fee of $15,674.
When it comes to compulsory fees, undergraduate students across the country are paying 6.8 per cent more on average this year, with Alberta students facing an enormous 31.1 per cent increase.
—Sally Brown
All fees in the accompanying chart are for undergraduate arts and science programs as of September 2009. The names of several universities appear twice:
Quebec institutions where out-of-province fees apply, and universities where there are different fees for arts programs and science programs.
Compulsory ancillary fees can vary according to program, or in the case of UBC and UNB, by campus location: students at UBC Okanagan campus pay $125 less than students at the main Vancouver campus; students at UNB Saint John pay $61 more than those at UNB Fredericton. UOIT’s fees include the cost of a laptop. Ancillary fees include student health plan fees. If students are covered by another insurance plan, they can opt out of most health plans, which range in cost from $52 to $386.
*Tuition at Nova Scotia universities is reduced for residents of the province.
Out-of-province students must pay $1,022 more than the tuition fees listed here.
