Longtime commitment is not hard to find in Ticat Nation; whether it’s in the Hamilton heartland or among the widespread loyalists who follow the team from afar after leaving the city.
Lyla Wilkins is one of the latter, but has taken it to new heights. Known only by her military nickname “Willy” after 40 years in the Canadian navy, the Hamilton native retired last spring and lives on Vancouver Island.
A season’s ticket holder since Tim Hortons Field opened and, before that, intermittently at Ivor Wynne Stadium, Wilkins bought a BC Lions subscription this year with a friend, but she also maintained her Ticat season’s tickets.
And she managed to attend all but two of the nine 2024 Ticat home games! She missed one game in August, another in September.
“There was one time when both teams played on the same night,” she said at the Eastern Social Hall during the Grey Cup. “I chose the Ticats.”
The Lions and Ticats often played on the same weekend, leading to some unusual travel arrangements. In June’s second weekend of the season BC played its home opener against Calgary and Wilkins took in that Saturday night game, then caught a red-eye to Hamilton, arriving just in time for the kickoff of the Ticats’ Sunday home opener against Saskatchewan.
“It was exhausting this year” Wilkins understated. “But it was worth it to see the Ticats. I breezed into town, a friend picked me up at the airport so I could save money by not renting a car, and I stayed with my mom in Burlington.
“The hardest one to get back for was the last game of the season because it came first. Usually if the Lions and Ticats are home on the same weekend the Lions play first and it’s easier because there’s a red eye from west to east, but there isn’t one from east to west, so I only made the Lions’ game that weekend by an hour or so
“I’ve renewed my Tim Hortons Field seats again for next year. I don’t have the heart to give up my Ticats tickets, I’ve had them so long.”
Wilkins spent the first few years of her life in Hamilton’s east end, then the family moved to Burlington, where she went elementary school at Mountain Gardens and Rolling Meadows, then high school at Lester B. Pearson.
She attended McMaster in phys ed., and while there joined the naval reserve at HMCS Star. That year she bought her first set of season’s tickets, at Ivor Wynne Stadium.
She eventually became an intelligence officer, rising to Lieutenant-Commander and spent much of her career in the operations room at Esquimalt, Canada’s Pacific Coast naval base. She travelled a lot for work and would often buy a flex pack so she could make Ticat games when she could.
But when she was transferred to Regina the year (2014) Tim Hortons Field opened, she bought full season’s tickets again, and made every game that year—“I burned through 200,000 air miles that season”—and has held her subscription ever since. When she flies east she uses air miles for one leg of the trip, and pays for the other leg.
“It was a lot of fun this season,” she said. “Although I didn’t get a lot of sleep.”
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MORE FROM GREY CUP WEEK
Stavros Katsantonis says “hopefully it’s not in the too-near future” but he’s preparing for life after pro football.
The Tiger-Cats’ starting safety worked the Grey Cup as the “media insider” for the CFL Players Association providing short-form behind-the-scene coverage and player interviews for a number of CFLPA social media outlets.
“Potentially I’d get into in broadcast or the media side of football,” Katsantonis said. “This was a good way to get a feel for that.”
Each year’s Grey Cup committee usually goes to the previous year’s Cup to study “best practices” and BC Lions club president Duane Vienneau, who oversaw the post-pandemic 2021 Grey Cup game in Hamilton for the CFL said the Lions “learned a lot from Hamilton’s Grey Cup last year, they did a great job.”
But one of the signature events of the enormously successful 2023 Cup week in Hamilton—the centrepiece Carrie Underwood concert at FirstOntario Centre—could not be replicated in Vancouver because there is no large arena in the area near the picturesque waterfront Vancouver Convention Centre, where all the events for this year’s Cup week were located .
“You look at your site and you build it out,” said Vienneau, who’s been involved in organizing about a dozen Grey Cups. “We wanted all our events at and around the Convention Centre. You are a product of your environment. Hamilton went for the big Carrie Underwood show because it made perfect sense…it was right there.”
