First season 1882 Year built 1971 | Athletic director Leslie Dal Cin Location Kingston, Canada | |
 | ||
Head coach Pat Sheahan
17th year, 83–53–0 (.610) Other Staff Greg Marshall (DC)
Phil Roberts (SC)
Ryan Sheahan (QB) Home Stadium Richardson Memorial Stadium | ||
Queen s gaels football commercial
The Queen's Gaels football team represents Queen's University which is based in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. The team plays Canadian Interuniversity Sport football in the Ontario University Athletics conference. The program began in 1882 and has competed for and won three Grey Cup championships and four Vanier Cup championships. The program has also boasted three Hec Crighton Trophy winners, including Tom Denison who won it twice.
Contents
History
The program is one of the longest-lived and storied in the entire Canadian Interuniversity Sport. The team began organized play in 1883 when the Ontario Rugby Football Union was first founded and won ORFU championships in 1893 and 1894. Queen's has competed continuously since 1882, celebrating its 125th anniversary in 2007. The first organized university football league in Canada, the Canadian Intercollegiate Rugby Football Union (CIRFU), was founded in Kingston in November, 1897, with charter members Queen's, McGill University, and the University of Toronto. The football team exerted its dominance in the 1920s, winning three straight Grey Cups in 1922, 1923 and 1924. Once teams stopped competing for the Grey Cup, which was begun being solely awarded to Canadian Football League teams in 1955, the Gaels turned their attention to the Vanier Cup, appearing in the CIS championship game five times and winning four of those games in 1968, 1978, 1992 and 2009.
The team is led by head coach Pat Sheahan who has been in charge of the football program at Queen's since taking over in 2000. He led the team to their most recent Vanier Cup win in 2009 and has only missed the playoffs in five of the 17 years that he has been the head coach.
Recent years
The team won their fourth Vanier Cup in 2009, but due to quarterback Danny Brannagan's graduation (and subsequent signing by the Toronto Argonauts) and other key players leaving, the team endured a difficult 2010 season, finishing 3-5. The team just barely made the playoffs in 2010, but had strong seasons in 2011 and 2012 when the team finished 6-2 and in third place in both years. The Gaels qualified for the playoffs for eight straight years until they finally missed the playoffs in 2014. The team finished fourth in the OUA in 2015, but they were upset by the Carleton Ravens in the semi-final game. The team finished in seventh place in 2016 with a 3-5 record and missed the playoffs due to a tie-breaker with Guelph, whom they lost to earlier in the season.
Season-by-season record
The following is the record of the Queen's Gaels football team since Pat Sheahan became head coach in 2000:
Queen's Gaels in the CFL
As of the start of the 2016 CFL season, eight former Gaels players are on CFL teams' rosters:
Few know that Carl Voss (BA 27) was both an excellent football and hockey player. While at university he played 4 seasons (1924 to 1927) with the Queen's Golden Gaels. This included a victory in the 1924 12th Grey Cup. Voss has his name engraved on the Grey Cup for this season. Voss also scored the Stanley Cup winning goal for the Chicago Blackhawks in the 1938 Stanley Cup Finals. He was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame.
This makes Voss, along with Hall-of-Famer Lionel Conacher, one of only two players to have their name engraved on both the Stanley Cup and the Grey Cup.