By CLAUDE SCILLEY

It wasn’t supposed to go like this.

It was supposed to be a walk in the park, easy as pie. There was no reason to feel intimidated, just because I was covering my first Queen’s football game, everybody told me.

They were right. I’d reported about university football games for four or five years by 1980, across the bay at Royal Military College, but this was Queen’s, one of the most storied programs in the land. It was the plum assignment for a sports writer at the Whig-Standard, the junior hockey team notwithstanding. Not only were the Golden Gaels an institution, one of the men who once wrote about the team for the newspaper was in the Canadian Football Hall of Fame, for gosh sakes.

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It’s not without a little bit of sadness today that I announce that I no longer will be writing for sportkingston.ca.

There are a number of reasons for this. Suffice to say that when an endeavor no longer brings you any enjoyment, it’s time to move on. I won’t continue in any way giving less than the subject material deserves.

I wish to thank everyone for their kind words and support.

Mike Tomlinson of the Queen’s Golden Gaels has won the Dale Iwanoczko Sportsman Award for the second consecutive season.

The award is presented by Ontario University Athletics to the men’s volleyball player who best displays academic achievement, community involvement and athletic performance.

A fifth-year right side hitter from Stratford, Tomlinson finished in among the Top 10 in the league kills per set (3.37), hitting percentage (.286) and points per set (4.0). He was named to the OUA all-star team for the third year in a row, this time to the second team.

Currently completing an honours degree in biomedical (mechanical) engineering, Tomlinson is co-president of the Queen's Varsity Leadership Council, which organizes varsity athletes for community activities and fundraisers, and provides a forum for athletes to discuss and affect relevant issues.

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I guess we’ll see.

When the brochure arrived the other day with information about renewing season tickets for the coming Queen’s University football season, the eye of the Commerce grad cum thrift monger went, as you may expect, directly to the price.

People had been wondering how much seats in the new stadium would cost. Some of us had mused that it would be reasonable to expect some kind of increase. It would seem appropriate to pay more to sit in a brand new facility than it did in the old place.

One would have thought, however, that a need to reward the faithful who had inhabited a barely adequate place for a dozen or more years—a facility that had become downright decrepit in the last two—would have mitigated against an increase that would be too substantial.

Yikes.

One hundred and seventy-nine dollars.

Per seat. For four games.

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Mother Nature was not in the corner of the Queen Elizabeth Raiders.

Normally, after winning a game at the Eastern Ontario Secondary Schools Athletic Association single-A basketball tournament, a team is guaranteed a spot in the semifinals.

Not so this year, when weather played havoc with the schedule to an unprecedented degree.

As a result, QE got no reward for its 54-50 victory over St. Francis Xavier of Hammond in its final round robin game at the six-team tournament in Brockville Tuesday afternoon.

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