For 50 years, the University of Guelph’s Alumni Stadium has been a beacon of pride and inspiration for the campus community and beyond.

Since opening in October 1970, the stadium on the northeast corner of campus has served as a hub of athletic aspiration and achievement and as one of the most active sports venues in the city of Guelph.

The multi-purpose facility is so named because alumni were at the forefront of its development. A great many U of G grads have held an intense loyalty to the stadium from its beginnings to today, says Scott McRoberts, the University’s director of athletics. Alumni and others with special connections to U of G continue to ensure its vitality.

In particular, the contributions of former Gryphons football head coach Stu Lang have transformed the facility in recent years and sparked a renaissance in U of G’s football program, many say.

“The support of alumni and donors has been huge,” McRoberts says. “The facility would not be what it is today without that generous outpouring from people who have really strong feelings about the stadium and the important place it holds in the community. And it’s probably the one facility that has the most community usage of any outdoor sports facility in our city.”

Over the half-century since the stadium was built – its construction cost $600,000, the equivalent of $4.1 million today – many momentous events and triumphs have happened here.

“It’s been a hub and beacon for so many things over the years,” McRoberts says, “from world-class track events to the Hamilton Tiger-Cats calling Alumni Stadium home in 2013, to high school football on Friday nights, to the Toronto Argonauts holding their training camp here in 2016. And it was the home for our 1984 Vanier Cup-winning Gryphons, and it has hosted Guelph minor football and so many community track and field events.”

Today’s stadium is part of a continuum of U of G athletic pursuits dating back to the Ontario Agricultural College (OAC) football team of the 1880s.

Young athletes who step onto the field today and experience a sense of awe over the splendour of the place share that feeling with athletes who were among the first users of the stadium.

Bill Laidlaw’s love for and dedication to Alumni Stadium and the University of Guelph have been unwavering since 1970, when he was a first-year U of G history student newly recruited to the Gryphons football team.

More recently, Laidlaw has been a U of G volunteer extraordinaire, including chairing the committee organizing Alumni Stadium’s 50th anniversary. The event was to have brought together hundreds of alumni in an unprecedented celebration, but it was postponed last year due to COVID-19. The celebration will occur perhaps as soon as this coming fall.

“It’s probably the one facility that has the most community usage of any outdoor sports facility in our city.”

As a new post-secondary student and varsity athlete, Laidlaw stepped into his first training camp as the brand-new stadium neared its completion. He recalls feeling dazzled and overwhelmed.

“I was an above-average football player. I played a couple of years and was so proud to be on the team,” says Laidlaw, who played under coach Dick Brown and became lifelong friends with many of his teammates. That 1970 squad was one of the best in the country and nearly went to the Vanier Cup, he says.

“I remember my dad dropping me off for camp in August of ’70. There was a second-floor room under the stands with bunk beds, and that’s where rookies had to sleep. The stadium was just being finished and you got this sense that you had made it to the big time, that you were in the CFL or NFL, because in high school you didn’t have any of this.”

One night during training camp, a gale-force wind whipped through, Laidlaw says. The shiny aluminum bleachers had been set in place but not yet bolted down. The wind toppled them, sounding and feeling like “the end of time” to the rookies startled awake below.

“The new stadium demonstrated that the University had a commitment to football and to sports in general, which other universities didn’t have,” Laidlaw says. “As a 19-year-old, to be in a change room that was brand new, with a whirlpool and a sauna room: it was the big leagues for a lot of us.”

Football was all the rage in those days, said Dr. Steve Stewart, a St. Thomas, Ont., veterinarian, and a grad of OAC and the Ontario Veterinary College. He played five seasons with the Gryphons football squad, beginning in the late ’60s. He also chaired the athletics advisory council when the plans for a new stadium were being developed.

Then, the Canadian Football League was cherished across the country, and every varsity player aspired to play in it, Stewart said. At a time when the Canadian professional game was at its height and university football was very popular, the old U of G stadium had outlived its usefulness.

“The crowds were too big,” he says. “There was one incident where fans started throwing beer bottles on the field and University president Dr. William Winegard wouldn’t tolerate it.”

Stewart saved a brochure from 1970 about the opening of the new stadium. It includes the text of a speech by then director of athletics W.F. “Bill” Mitchell, who commented on the ultimatum that got Alumni Stadium off the ground.

Stewart saved a brochure from 1970 about the opening of the new stadium. It includes the text of a speech by then director of athletics W.F. “Bill” Mitchell, who commented on the ultimatum that got Alumni Stadium off the ground.

Mitchell said Winegard, who served as U of G president from 1967 to 1975, triggered the development “by suggesting that if we couldn’t accommodate the growing numbers of people who were interested in seeing our Gryphons in action, we would have to pack up the game.” That sparked the development of the new stadium, one that Winegard wholeheartedly supported.

“Dr. Winegard was a great guy who did a lot for the University,” Stewart says today. “And he was really enthusiastic about sport. He provided the impetus to get this thing started.”

The $600,000 cost was offset through a development fund, gate receipts and contributions from individuals and corporations. The alumni-backed Alma Mater Fund gave $20,000 of its $70,000 1969 campaign total to what would be the most modern football facility among Ontario universities, one with all the amenities – large locker rooms and rooms for coaches, well-equipped training rooms, a sauna and more.

Stewart was a U of G student for eight years and the campus became his home. He is a also a long-time donor to the Department of Athletics – anything associated with the Gryphons, but especially the football program.

“When I was a student there, football in the fall was the focus of the whole year and it spearheaded the enthusiasm on campus,” he says. “I continue to think that football is important to the life of the University and that’s why I continue to contribute to it.”

“When I was a student there, football in the fall was the focus of the whole year.”

Laidlaw has a similar personal attachment to U of G, one nurtured by football but also based in gratitude.

“I owe the University a lot because I was an average student and yet I managed to excel with all the support I received,” he says. “That set me on my way in life and I have to give back. That’s what you have to do – you have to support your alma mater because you owe it so much.”

Named as winner of the 2020 Alumni Volunteer Award, Laidlaw serves in several voluntary capacities at U of G. Currently, he heads a campaign to raise several million dollars for the performing arts on campus.

“They took a risk on me and I’ve got to pay them back somehow.”

Since 2012, Alumni Stadium has undergone a steady transformation to serve the community better – new turf and track, new lights, updated video screen and press box, the pavilion and landscaping in front of the complex along Lang Way. All have preserved the stadium’s history and legacy while modernizing and improving it.

In particular, in recent years, the stadium has gone through an extraordinary transformation, McRoberts says, the result primarily of the generous support of a donor with a passion for football and a great love for the U of G football program.

Stu Lang was a former professional football player for eight years with the CFL’s Edmonton Eskimos and the Gryphons head football coach from 2010 to 2015. He helped turn the Gryphons into one of the top university football programs in Canada during his six-year tenure, including capturing the Yates Cup in 2015, nearly 20 years after U of G had last won the trophy.

Through their Angel Gabriel Foundation, Stu and his wife, Kim, have given more than $25 million to Gryphon football, including funding for a 14,000-square-foot pavilion at the stadium. Completed in October 2017, precisely 47 years after the stadium opened, the pavilion added professional-calibre facilities, including a players’ lounge, a state-of-the-art locker room, a therapy room with cold and hot tubs, a study area for players, a boardroom, coaches’ offices and a game-day rooftop patio viewing area. Even earlier, a major expansion and renovation begun in 2011 added an eight-lane track and synthetic turf to the field. The campus road where the stadium is located is now named Lang Way for the facility’s benefactors.

“I had been wanting to build this while I was coach, to create a home for our players and alumni,” Lang said when the new facility officially opened in 2017.

“Kim and I believe there are two classrooms on this campus: the traditional indoor classroom and the outdoor athletic field classroom. On the athletic field, you learn about dealing with challenges, handling success and pulling together with people who are different from you. That’s why we continue to support athletics at the University.”

The Langs are currently supporting a major planned renovation at Alumni Stadium to be completed this year that will include a new fan entrance and improvements to the existing weight room to create a state-of-the-art performance centre.

Alumni Stadium is now an iconic facility for the University community and the city in which it has stood for just over 50 years, says McRoberts. Until the pandemic hit in March 2020, as many as 250 Guelph community members, ages 5 to 65, used the stadium daily.

“These are people sharing this one important facility, being active in what is truly a community hub. It speaks to the uniqueness of the stadium, its traditions and what alumni envisioned it to be,” McRoberts says.

“It goes to show how important it is to reach out, make connections and build relationships.”

“There is nothing better than a homecoming game with 8,000 or 9,000 fans and a lot of students wanting to be up on that hill in their Gryphon gear.”

Plans were all set for the 50th anniversary last October. But the pandemic dragged on and shut it down.

Fortunately, the stadium has not sat idle during the pandemic. By observing strict COVID-19 prevention protocols, U of G’s athletic teams – football, soccer, rugby, lacrosse, field hockey and track – have trained and practised throughout the 2020-21 academic year in the stadium’s outdoor space.

“It was truly a lifeline, more than ever, for these athletes over the past year. It was a safe place for them to train and be together at a time when they needed it the most,” McRoberts says.

Laidlaw says the 50th-anniversary celebration is intended to show how important the stadium is to the University, its students and alumni, the wider community and the members of past football teams. Early this year, he said he hoped to have the 1970 team back to the stadium for the anniversary this fall and is eagerly awaiting the time when it can happen. “We will have a terrific celebration weekend with fellow teammates and friends, and with all the energy, emotion and awe that it deserves.”

For now, he is focused on reflecting on what the stadium has become in recent times.

“I think it’s just fantastic. You have to credit Stu Lang. Stu was asked by then head coach Kyle Walters if he wanted to do some volunteer work and he went on to become head coach and the University’s largest individual donor. It goes to show how important it is to reach out, make connections and build relationships.”

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Burns, who is from southern Ontario, has a B.Sc.(’10) and a M.Sc. (’13) from U of G.

Burns considers her work at the Zoo a dream job. At this time she is working to save the Poweshiek skipperling, a small butterfly with a portly body and yellow-orange wings that is close to extinction. It only survives in the wild in Manitoba and Michigan. Burns is part of a team that successfully bred the species in captivity.

“It had never been done before anywhere,” said Burns.

CBC Manitoba’s Future 40 Awards recognizes the achievements of 40 Manitobans age 40 and younger who make outstanding professional or service contributions to the community and who are making a difference in the lives of Manitobans.

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Alumna Emma Hogg, a Sault Ste. Marie-based author, has a new novel out. Picket Fences is published by Tidewater Press.

In an article in the Sault Star, Hogg said the publisher pushed her to take her writing to another level.

Hogg talked about and read from her new work at the online Toronto’s Word on the Street book and magazine festival in September.

The book’s main character, Sloane Sawyer, finds her ambition to become a graphic designer has not been realized. She struggles with the apparent loss of dreams and is unable to recognize her ability to revise her future, Hogg says in the article. Ultimately, she begins to understand that she has the power “to control the controllable and accept the uncontrollable.”

Picket Fences is available at www.amazon.ca, www.chapters.indigo.ca and at www.tidewaterpress.ca. Hogg graduated from U of G with a B.A. in 2003.

Picket Fences is her sixth novel.

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Akosua Frema Osei-Opare was celebrated as one of the first females to occupy high offices in the West African nation in an article in that country’s GhanaWeb.com. The article celebrates the accomplishments of four Ghanaian women.  

She received a master’s degree in food science from U of G in 1976 and went on to become a lecturer and department head at the University of Ghana. She also worked with the United Nations in the Women in Fisheries project in various capacities in Uganda, Ethiopia, Congo and Namibia, and is a development consultant.  

She served as a deputy minister in the government of president John Agyekum Kufuor and was a two-term member of parliament. She was appointed chief of staff by president Nana Akufo-Addo in 2017.

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She fought through it, healed and changed her running mechanics. By 2016, she reached the Olympic standard time in the women’s 5,000-metre.

She graduated from U of G in 2013. Her running greatness was featured in Canadian Running magazine in February.

Originally from Guelph, Seccafien became a competitive runner in high school. She came to U of G in 2010, where she won 5,000-metre gold at the 2013 Canadian Championships. She made her Olympic debut at Rio in 2016 and has won the Canadian title in the 5,000-metre four times. She made the 2019 World Championship 5,000-metre final.

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She was accompanied on the adventure by her mother, Dr. Ingrid Van Der Linden, also a veterinarian. They both have practices in eastern Ontario. 

The mother and daughter were in Ghana to help farmers increase their income through better feed formulation, as well as improve animal housing and the control and diagnosis of diseases in poultry and livestock. 

Their story made the pages of The Review.

Thomas, who also holds a degree in biology from U of G, is a veterinarian in Almonte, Ont. 

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Articles in The Sarnia Journal and The National Post described her important work in the African country.

Connor graduated from U of G with a masters degree in political science and international development in 2004. 

A senior humanitarian and development professional, she has spent about 15 years in resource mobilization, program management and leadership roles in a number of conflict-affected environments. 

Her work has especially focused on emergency response, food security, child protection and resilience programming. World Vision is currently assisting the country cope with outbreaks of both COVID-19 and Ebola. 

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, she oversees a staff of 400 staff and an annual budget of $40 million.

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“Refugees are people living in forced displacement and they often have no legal documentation, which is the only way they can get access to many services,” says the U of G grad. “To have legal status, they must have documentation.”

When people are forced to flee their homes to escape war, persecution or violence, registration and documentation is a vital first step in ensuring their protection against forced return, arbitrary arrest and detention. Without documentation, he says, persons are at risk of being stateless, since they are unable to provide evidence of their legal identity and often cannot access basic social services and education. The UNHCR program helps keep families together and reunites children with their families.

“I help to ensure that people have access to an identity, so that children can get birth certificates and people have legal documentation and rights,” he says. “The job is very much science-based, involving statistics, population profiles and demographic data.”

Huard studied physical sciences at U of G from 1988 to 1991, graduating with a B.Sc. He went on to earn a graduate diploma in international public health management at the University of Paris XI and also studied law at the University of Ottawa. Many of the skills he acquired at U of G are directly applicable to his work.

He has been stationed in refugee zones throughout the world, including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Uganda, Eastern Europe and most recently Brazil. Now posted to Panama in the UNHCR Regional Bureau for the Americas and Caribbean, Huard is a registration and identity management officer for the Americas.

“My law studies helped me understand the legal side of immigration, refugee status and rights, but when it comes to actually putting things into practice, you need that scientific methodology of mathematics and statistics,” he says. “All of this, I learned in courses at U of G.”

UNHCR uses processes including biometrics to enrol “persons of concern” – refugees, internally displaced persons, asylum seekers or those who are stateless. The enrolment process involves recording physical characteristics and as much biographical information and family data as possible. The UNHCR global database comprises several million refugees.

According to helprefugees.org, more than 70 million people are currently displaced in the world, a record high. One in every 113 people around the world is an asylum seeker, internally displaced or a refugee. Currently, 55 percent of refugees come from Syria, South Sudan and Afghanistan. In the Americas alone, some five million Venezuelans have sought refuge outside their country of origin, including in Canada.

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“When I was about 11 years old, our teacher asked us to draw a picture of our future,” says Henry, who completed an M.Sc. in international rural planning and development at U of G in 1998.

“I drew a picture of myself on the edge of the Nile River, in an adobe hut with a cat and a dog, helping people. I knew from the time I was young that I wanted to travel the world.”

Her career as a senior humanitarian affairs officer with the United Nations took her around the world, including to Sudan in 2015. To take the edge off her extremely demanding work there, she took up sailing lessons on the Nile.

Henry was eight years old when her mother, a single parent, packed up Sheilagh and her sister and moved to a village in England. From there, they travelled throughout Europe and into the Soviet Union.

Henry went on to work in many troubled countries, including Ethiopia, Angola, Indonesia and Afghanistan.

In the immediate aftermath of a disaster situation – tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes – numerous international agencies and NGOs descend to administer aid, she says. Henry typically worked in coordination roles.

“When there’s a disaster, we’re the ones that make sure there’s coverage for all of those affected,” she says. “We do needs assessment, information analysis and mapping, and then provide that information to all of the actors out there, so that they know what areas and which beneficiaries are being covered and which ones are not.”

Like her mother, Henry is a courageous world traveller. After her seven-year posting in Afghanistan, and accompanied by her then husband, she drove 11,000 kilometres from Afghanistan to Cork, Ireland, in a 1969 VW Bug. The trip took four months.

Humanitarian aid workers are generally type A personalities possessing a sense of invincibility, she says. For her, a devastating attack in Sudan in 2016 changed that.

“I was coming home from the office. We were not far from a refugee camp. Two South Sudanese refugees on a motorcycle were coming behind me. I had a backpack on, strapped to both shoulders.”

The motorcycle passenger grabbed the backpack, pulling Henry to the ground and dragging her along the gravel road. She reached for the man’s shoulder and tried to pull herself up.

“I knew from the time I was young that I wanted to travel the world.”

“In a few seconds, everything changed for me. He was off balance and being pulled off the motorcycle. He bit down on my thumb and let go of the backpack.”

Her thumb and tendons were torn off, and she suffered badly damaged muscle and bone. But the ordeal didn’t end there. Once off the motorcycle, the man began to beat her.

Extensive reconstructive surgery reattached the thumb, but it no longer functions properly. She needed months of therapy to heal from post-traumatic stress disorder. She hasn’t been overseas since.

Asked what drove her to do the work she did, Henry sounds more like a realist than an idealist.

“I honestly believe that there is nothing that any human does in the world that isn’t selfish,” she says. “Even if you think you are doing a selfless act, you do it because you feel good about it.”

Henry believes it is crucial to question one’s place and work in the world. Are you doing what you need to be doing? Finding herself questioning and envisioning again, she is planning another epic road trip.

“I want to drive from Alaska to Argentina in a classic VW Kombi van. That will prepare me to go back overseas. I’m getting ready to dive back in.”

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Throughout her nearly 30-year career with the United Nations, McDade helped launch groundbreaking environmental sustainability projects in China, mobilized hurricane relief support in Cuba, supported prison reforms in Uruguay and supervised microcredit, bilingual education and rural development projects in Guatemala.

She has experienced the world in an extraordinary way – at its inspiring heights and to its heartbreaking depths. She moved to a new country every three or four years, with nine international relocations during her career.

“The issue is, there’s never enough you can do,” says McDade, who studied economics and international development at the University of Guelph in the mid-80s. “Many of these issues we are addressing are long-term structural issues that will be with us for generations. So, the sense that you could never do enough, never fix it all, is one thing that a lot of aid workers get fatigued from, especially front-line humanitarian workers.”

Reflecting on her life as a top United Nations Development Program (UNDP) official, she says, “I was never bored, ever.”

UNDP works to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure peace and prosperity. It currently provides funding to projects in some 170 countries.

Early in her career, McDade administered development assistance and projects, including disbursing UN funds. As a specialist in energy and environment, she helped decide which projects to support.

She negotiated projects with government counterparts, visited projects to monitor their progress and ensured reports were provided to donors.

As the assistant resident representative in China, she oversaw UN-funded projects to establish renewable energy technology in the country. She also helped introduce China’s hydrogen fuel cell buses, which now run in various cities, and the country’s program to reduce the use of ozone-depleting substances.

“It was very normal to meet with presidents, to be around the UN secretary general, very normal to fly around the world.”

“For me, it was very normal to meet with presidents, to be around the UN secretary general, very normal to fly around the world on planes, to make speeches and be on the TV and radio.”

When McDade was at U of G, economics and international development programs had opposing world views, she says.

“International development was the Birkenstock-OPIRG-Ralph-Nader-hippie-left crowd, with a very black and white view of the world: peasant good, World Bank bad,” she says. “In economics, everybody was going to go to business school or law school, and had an equally simplistic view of the world: poor people are poor because they don’t work.”

That friction was just the right kind of undergraduate experience for a young woman who grew up in an underdeveloped region of Canada and was eager to break out of the cycle of poverty and truly make a difference in the lives of the poor around the world. At the University, she discovered her great love: the economics of the developing world.

“I learned that there’s a reason why poverty reproduces itself, a reason why international assistance doesn’t always work,” says McDade. “And it’s because of the false idea that the right answers are in the north and the poorer people are in the south, and if they only had the right answers, they wouldn’t be poor. That is how the whole foreign aid mechanism is set up, which is really not how the world is.”

McDade grew up in a small working-class community outside Saint John, N.B. Her parents came from poor families, but benefited from upward mobility that is possible in Canada, she says.

At age 16, she was accepted at the Lester B. Pearson United World College in Victoria, B.C., on a scholarship. Her parents, who had never travelled, saw the opportunity as her way to get more job prospects.

“They raised me to think that anything I wanted to do, I should give it a try,” McDade says. “‘You can do anything,’ they said.”

Pearson College sparked her interest in international languages, travel and development.

McDade was fluent in English and French at the time, but her Uruguayan roommate insisted that McDade would have to learn Spanish if she wanted to truly experience the world.

“With zero Spanish, I decided at the ripe old age of 16 to study Spanish,” McDade says. “I informed my parents that I would be going to Spain for the summer because I needed to immerse myself in Spanish. At the age of 17, they let me go to Spain by myself. I am still grateful for the trust they had in me.”

McDade ultimately became the UN representative in Cuba and Uruguay between 2006 and 2013.

McDade served as assistant secretary general for the final two years of her career spent with the UNDP. Earlier, she worked on capacity building, following the UNDP principle that if the institutions of the state don’t work, the economy won’t work.

“A country needs a functioning legal system, a functioning social welfare system, functioning land registries and people who can get identity cards,” she says. “Many people all over the world are poor because they don’t have a legal identity that allows them to open a bank account or register for services. They don’t exist in the social registry because they don’t have a birth certificate. And most of those people are women.”

Following a four-year assignment as the UN representative in Cuba from 2006 to 2010, McDade took on a similar role in Uruguay, focusing on human rights and prison reform.

“My parents raised me to think that anything I wanted to do, I should give it a try.” ~ Alumna Susan McDade

“The prison system in the country is antiquated, with mixed populations in the same prisons, minors processed as adults and small children in prisons with their mothers. In such a system, the youth offenders grew up broken, often turned into criminals for life. It was really bad.”

The UN helped the government modernize the prisons, beginning with a digital case management system. “If your file is forgotten, and it’s just some guy with a pencil, you could spend the rest of your life in an Uruguayan prison.”

McDade recently took early retirement to spend more time with her children, moving back to the small community in New Brunswick where she grew up. She says her mother is happy to have her home.

Her UN work helped improve lives for countless people around the world, but it also took a personal toll. She had to leave great friends behind with each move, and she witnessed extreme poverty and hardship from one assignment to the next.

“After I had kids, I could no longer work directly with populations, because every dying kid was my own.”

She says there is much that the international agency is unable to accomplish, given underfunding and a massive mandate. Even as multilateralism is increasingly challenged, says McDade, the UN is still an important organization.

In one crucial area, she felt she was unable to do all she’d hoped to do.

“I worked for years and years on climate change, so to see the world running to the edge of the cliff right now is very demoralizing.”

Still, she adds, “I hope my children get from me the belief that people are good and that everything is possible. Change is possible, success is possible, solutions are possible, and people are fundamentally good.”

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