Richardson Stadium - Kingston, Ontario
N 44° 13.660 W 076° 31.000
18T E 378868 N 4898278
Richardson Stadium is home to Queen's University Golden Gaels football team. Queen's has won the Canadian University Championship, Vanier Cup, on four occasions, most recently in 2009.
Waymark Code: WMK402
Location: Ontario, Canada
Date Posted: 02/09/2014
Views: 8
Richardson Stadium is home to Queen's University Golden Gaels football team. Queen's has won the Canadian University Championship, Vanier Cup, on four occasions, most recently in 2009.
The west stands are for students and the east stands (under the media booths) are for alumni and the general public.
The stadium is named in memory of George Taylor Richardson, a Queen's graduate renowned for his athleticism and sportsmanship who died in World War I. It is the second stadium to bear the name. The original stadium was funded by George's brother, James Armstrong Richardson, graduate and Chancellor of Queen's.
In 2013, Queen's had to revamp the seating due to an engineering review which deemed them to be unsafe. About 6,500 seats were removed and replaced. The new seating capacity is 8,500, which includes two new end zone seating sections.
Queen's University was one of the first schools to organize football teams. The game was first played in a rudimentary form at Queen's in the late 1870s as informal matches of "Association Football" [soccer] with catching.
In 1882, two brothers from Ottawa, Fred and Jackson Booth, introduced Queen's athletes to the game of "rugby football," an older version of modern rugby and the game from which football at Queen's evolved.
The game was referred to as rugby football until well into the 20th century and was quite different from the modern game of football – for example, it was not until the 1930s that the now-crucial element of forward passing was permitted.
Up until the 1930s, Queen's teams played not just against university teams, but against the best football squads in the country. Queen's won its first National Rugby Football Championship in 1893 and by the early 1920s, its teams were virtually unbeatable. Led by Canadian hall-of-famers Harry "Red" Batsone and Frank "Pep" Leadly, Queen's won consecutive Grey Cups in 1922, 1923, and 1924 and went undefeated for a stretch of 26 games. An indication of Queen's strength was the score of the 1923 final in which Queen's beat the Regina Roughriders 54-0.
Shortly after these triumphs, the big-city teams took over the game and universities restricted themselves to intercollegiate play.
Queen's played for years in a league with traditional rivals McGill University, the University of Toronto, and the University of Western Ontario. But the growing number of universities in central Canada led to realignment and Queen's played in the Ontario-Quebec Intercollegiate Football Conference (OQIFC) from 1980 to 2001. In the 2001-2002 season, the Golden Gaels were shifted back into the Ontario Universities Association (OUA) conference.
Numerous Queen's players have gone on to play in professional leagues, including CFL great Ron Stewart - a star for Ottawa in the 1950s and 1960s and Canadian male athlete of the year in 1960 - and Mike Schad, one of the few Canadian-trained players drafted in the first round by the National Football League (fourth overall in 1986).
The Queen’s team has won the Vanier Cup in 1968, 1978, 1992, and 2009.
Richardson Stadium also plays host to international sporting events such as Pan-Am Rugby and FIFA soccer. The photos taken here are from the Kingston-area high school football final where our local team, Sydenham High School, lost the junior trophy but won the senior banner.
College Team that calls this Stadium Home: Queen's Golden Gaels
Stadium Capacity: 8500
Stadium Opened: 01/01/1971
Fan store?: no
Guided Tours: no
Venue's Address / Team URL: [Web Link]
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