Eleven Years Later, Tiger-Cats Return to the Field That Defined a Season

It’s not the first time they’ve returned to the scene of the non-crime, but when the Tiger-Cats travel to Guelph Friday night, they’ll be travelling back into history.

Guelph is the site of the Toronto Argonauts’ training camp, and they’ll play their “home” pre-season game at Alumni Stadium, after visiting Hamilton Stadium last weekend. 

It’s an exhibition game, the last before the 2025 regular season opens, preceded by this Saturday’s final roster cutdown. The Ticats open on the road, yet again, in Calgary Saturday June 7.

But 11 years ago, the Ticats were the home team at Alumni Stadium—not for just their pre-season home date, but for all but one of their regular-season games, and also the wild Eastern Semifinal and eventually the Grey Cup for the first time in 14 years. The one “home” fixture they didn’t host at Guelph was Touchdown Atlantic in Moncton.

But otherwise, they were a college campus team. The Ticats played their home games in Guelph as their new stadium—now named Hamilton Stadium—was being constructed for 2014, when the Pan Am Soccer tournament, and Ticat games, would be played there. Since it sits on the same parcel of land as Ivor Wynne Stadium did, the old Ticats’ home had to be torn down after the 2012 season, and the Ticats were left without a place to play, and also to practice.

So they scheduled their games at the University of Guelph and their daily practices at McMaster. But they couldn’t dress at McMaster or use the lockers and medical facilities there, so at the suggestion of new head coach Kent Austin, they transformed the bottom floor of their downtown Hamilton corporate offices on Jarvis Street into a clubhouse, meeting-room centre and athletic training facility

They would dress for practice in that basement, then climb aboard rented city buses to take them to and from McMaster, all in their pads and helmets. Small-time for sure, but big-time in its cumulative effect: the rapid bonding of a team that was coming off a 6-12 season at Ivor Wynne, had a new coach and many new players, into a team that started out poorly but won seven of their last eight games at home—beat Montréal in the semi-final then upset defending Grey Cup champions Argos, coached by current Ticats’ head coach Scott Milanovich, in the Eastern final, right in Toronto.

On game days, they’d bus up to Guelph where the Ticats and the university had cooperated to add temporary seats on the east side, to boost the capacity to just over 13,000, with “luxury boxes”  and a press box also on that side of the field, in what were essentially tents.

They also created dressing rooms, medical facilities and offices out of portables located up a slight hill from the field. A hill that grew so slippery and muddy when it rained—which was pretty well all the time—that it wouldn’t have looked out of place on the Paris-to-Ancaster Bike Race.

To this day, Ticat fans and Guelph residents are linked by that season, and remember the weather.

It was one of the great stories in Canadian sports history but it’s been under-celebrated and too seldom re-told, as have so many of our most important tales.

“Nobody talks about that year enough,” then-quarterback Henry Burris told me five years ago on the day he was selected to the Canadian Football Hall of Fame.

“What we had to overcome; taking the bus from the team’s downtown office to McMaster every day just to practice; travelling 45 minutes just for home games; all that horrible weather we had in Guelph.”

“We were a young team that had to grow quickly. What we created that year, establishing the winning culture, is something that’s still being experienced in Hamilton.”

Burris was coming off an astounding season in 2012—setting the franchise record for single-season passing yards which Bo Levi Mitchell broke last year—but was sometimes benched in the ‘Guelph Year’ because of differences with coach Kent Austin.

But Burris always credits Austin with fostering a culture in which what the Ticats’ didn’t have that year was positively morphed into what they did have; which was cohesion, an organization which came up with creative, collaborative solutions, and some new players who would excite home crowds—at their future “real” home—for years. Among them: Simoni Lawrence, Speedy Banks, Luke Tasker, Jeremiah Masoli, Courtney Stephen.

Austin wouldn’t let them use their nomadic existence as any kind of excuse. No tolerance for an “everything is against us” mentality.

One of the things that was against them—and, in hindsight, more often against whomever was visiting—was meteorological. It always seemed to be rainy, windy or cold. Or all three at once.

“I just remember the monsoons way back then,” Lawrence mentioned a couple of years ago. “It was always raining.  The game I remember the most was when we were in the (1943) Flying Wildcats uniforms against BC and we were smoking Travis Lulay and Andrew Harris.”

That was a 37-29 victory played, oddly, two days before Labour Day.

The Ticats opened the year at 1-4, and looked like they would fulfill predictions that the transition season would be a disastrous one. But they caught fire to finish 10-8, including seven wins in their last eight home games.

The only home game they lost in that stretch was in late September, 35-11 to visiting Calgary, with Kevin Glenn the Stamps’ starting quarterback and Bo Levi Mitchell the No. 3 pivot, a year before he became a starter and future Hall of Famer.

He talked to Ticats.ca last year about that game.

“I came from a big high school, right?, so my entire football career I had a lot of fans in the stands,” Mitchell.  “Going from Texas, to college football in the States, then I came up here and in my mind I’m thinking, ‘Professional football, I wonder how many fans are going to be there?’ and our first game in Calgary there are so many fans I’m thinking ‘wow’. Then I hear we’re playing a game at a university.

“I thought I was going to be underwhelmed by it. But the stands were packed and it just reminded you of an amazing high school game where it felt like there should be a band playing, a student section.

“I do remember that game and I wish I got to play more in it. I remember, that year, walking from the portables. Getting dressed in there and our bags just on the ground. We were just sitting down on the ground, sweating because it was hot as heck inside those portables. Then you’re walking through dirt and gravel to get down to the stadium. It felt like that at halftime they were going to bring out the oranges.”

Eleven years prior to the Ticats’ losing their stadium, the same thing happened to the NFL’s Chicago Bears. They were coming off a 13-3 season but dropped to 5-11 and missed the playoffs when they had to play at the University of Illinois. But they did not lose their practice facility while Soldier Field was being renovated, had retained the same head coach from the year before and most of the players from the previous year’s division winners. Their only disruption was every two weeks playing at Illinois, where the stadium was only 1500 seats smaller than their own field, not half the size, as Guelph was in comparison to Ivor Wynne the year before.

Oddly, Henry Burris played for both teams. He was a rookie quarterback who started the year at No. 3 and moved up to No. 2 and even started a game. He’s said that there was no comparison between the two experiences as a collective, what the Ticats accomplished came in much more trying circumstances than anything those Bears rans.

And the Ticats made much more of it. Their 2013 season is a story which should be told and retold, to a national audience but also to new Ticat players, like the ones who will be trying to make the team tomorrow night…on the same grounds.