New banners in Glendale gym pay tribute to past champions

(Jeff Helsdon Photo)

Jeff Helsdon, Editor

There was a sense of nostalgia as the team behind the new banners listing past athletic champions of Glendale High School gathered to look at their efforts.

Past students at Glendale will remember the pennants that hung in the old gym highlighting the teams and individuals who were county, Oxford-Elgin, WOSAA and provincial champions. Those have since morphed to include the newer TVRA championships. These banners came down when the older gymnasium was due for a new paint job.

Dave Sandor, who was head of phys-ed at the time, retired the same year but was still going to complete the task. Unfortunately, Covid restrictions got in the way and it was sidelined.

“It was Dave’s idea to take the pennant down and put the banners up,” credited former Glendale basketball coach Brian O’Rourke.

“Brian called me and said what’s happening here,” Sandor said.

The two got together, approached principal Dave Chisholm and got the project back on track. They had been talking for a few years but finally fulfilled the last obstacle, funding, with a donation from Ed and Ewart McLaughlin.

Finalizing the list, and ascertaining which athletic association was in place at the time took a lot of research on Sandor’s part. Not only did he go off the old banners, but he also looked at photos of the winners on the wall, at plaques and talked to coaches.

“It’s a great way to celebrate history and all the athletic championships over the past decades,” Chisholm said. “

The banners, which span one wall of the new gymnasium, cover the time from when Glendale opened in 1959 to a tennis team championship in 2023-2024. The banner design allows for more teams to be added as more championships are won.

O’Rourke reflected on the number of championships on the wall he was at the helm for, both with the Gemini and its predecessor the Glendale Griffins. The boys’ basketball teams won 18 of 19 Oxford-Elgin championships, and 12 WOSAA championships. Some of those were in the days before the regional school entity was divided into divisions. This meant Tillsonburg was playing against city schools. Glendale also played twice in the Detroit Silver Dome before a Pistons game.

In the hey days in the early 1970s, the players on O’Rourke’s roster included the offspring of players from the former Tillsonburg Livvies team, which won the Canadian men’s championship and was the core of the Canadian men’s Olympic basketball team twice. O’Rourke said the three Coulthard brothers became all Canadians on their university teams and one was drafted by the Pistons. Bob Horvath played for Fanshawe College and was MVP when the London college won the national championship.

O’Rourke also fondly remembers playing against Tillsonburg-born former Toronto Raptors coach Jay Triano when he was attending secondary school Niagara Falls’ A.N. Myer Secondary School. In the last eight seconds of an OFSSA quarter-final game with the Glendale Griffins up by three, O’Rourke told his players to let Triano score. He knew the clock would be running and the ball would go to Glendale, resulting in a one-point win.

Although he made it to OFSSA (provincials) three times, O’Rourke’s teams came away losing to the larger cities of Kitchener, Ottawa and Windsor.

“I have to admit I coached two badly,” he said, explaining he still remembers his decisions all of these years later.

Over the years, there were 20 players from Glendale who played on either college or university basketball teams. O’Rourke also gave credit to junior coaches Wayne Coyle and Dave Quarrie for building the Glendale basketball legacy.

Sandor, who coached soccer, volleyball and badminton, pointed to a 2018 boys’ soccer championship and winning silver at WOSSA.

“David put hours of research into this and it wouldn’t have happened without him,” O’Rourke said. “He can count that as an OFSAA championship as far as I am concerned.”