Shawnigan Lake School - Yearbook (Shawnigan Lake, British Columbia Canada)

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THE FALL ' -.

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THE FIRST XV Back Row: (L. to R.) Mr. D.W. Hyde-Lay, M. Van Santvoord, S. Void, T. Karouzos, M. Allsopp, S. Hutchinson, S. Evans, P. Schieldrop, J. Spruce Seated: (L. toR.) H. Schuurmans, S. Heffelfinger, R. Emery, D. Peel, R. Donahue, S. Spiropoulos, M. Ferguson The B.C. High Schools ' new Seasons of Play ruling seriously curtailed the number and the quality of matches we were able to play this season. The rule stated that no sport may now be played, and this includes practice matches, for more than 12 weeks in the school year. Faced with this decision all High Schools in the Province switched their senior rugby programs to the so called Spring season which would enable them to be eligible for the play-offs leading to the B.C. High School Rugby Championships held in mid-May. Not being prepared to switch with them and thereby be forced to alter our own spring and summer sports program, we elected, along with the other Independent Schools, to continue playing our rugby during the fall term. We were thus left with our usual Independent Schools fixtures plus any other non-school matches we could arrange. No longer were we able to sort out our teething problems with our customary exhibition games with schools such as Hillside, Magee, Point Grey and so on. A great pity as we have found these games extremely valuable in the past and have also thoroughly enjoyed our association with these schools, all of whom regularly produce very fine school sides. It was very clear from the beginning that we were short on experience and on size. A lot can be done about the former but not much about the latter. As the season wore on we became a much more cohesive side but without our usual early season matches to sort things out, it just took that much longer to arrive at our potentially strongest team, by which time the season was literally half over. Nevertheless we saved our best rugby for the last three or four matches and ended things on a very positive winning note. Our season opened with a fixture against York Mills Collegiate from Ontario who were out in B.C. on a Rugby Tour. Their team was very large and aggressive and proved too much for us so early in the season, winning the match by a 21-1 1 score. Early in the game we had the misfortune to lose, through injury, our captain and most experienced forward and with Darcy Peel ' s departure went any chance we had of competing in anything like level terms in the forwards. Next followed an easy victory over Cowichan U 19 XV by 32-6. Because we scored some rather nice tries, we thought we were better than we were. A rude awakening awaited us at St. Michael ' s University School who ran in five tries in beating us 14