The CIAU—Defining The National Championship

When the University of Alberta first formed a men’s hockey team early in the 20th century, it was forced to play in senior amateur leagues because there was no sanctioned body that oversaw competition between universities or colleges.

In the East, a group of universities in Ontario and Quebec formed the Canadian Interuniversity Athletic Union (CIAU) Central, a governing body that remained stable through to the Second World War.

After the war, the popularity of Canadian university sport soared. The CIAU Central swelled to 19 teams, but grew too large, too fast. The CIAU, including the Women's Intercollegiate Athletic Union formed in 1923, collapsed in the mid-1950s.

Meanwhile, the University of Alberta Golden Bears found a home playing in the Western Intercollegiate Athletic Association (WIAA), founded in 1920. The WIAA evolved into a strong association that stretched from Victoria in the west to the Thunder Bay’s Lakehead University to the east.

With the Quebec/Ontario CIAU Central collapse, the Alberta universities were looking to move beyond the WIAA. With the loss of the central Canadian governing body, new calls for a new, truly national governing body for university sport accelerated. In 1961, armed with $1-million of federal funding, a new CIAU formed under the auspices of federal fitness and amateur sport minister John Munro, with offices based out of Kingston, Ontario’s Royal Military College. Schools from British Columbia to Newfoundland enrolled.   One of the first challenges for the CIAU was to create a truly national hockey championship.

The two Kingston schools, Royal Military College and Queen’s University, agreed to donate a University Cup trophy, which commemorated the first game played between the two schools back in 1885; a match that is recorded as the first university hockey game in Canadian history. Seventy-eight years later, after the 1962-63 season, the trophy was presented to Hamilton’s McMaster University squad, as the new association's first hockey champions.

In 1969, the Western Canadian Intercollegiate Athletic Association, a later version of the WIAA, eventually became the Canada West conference of the CIAU. Canada West, recognizing the strength of women's programs, successfully petitioned to have women’s sport included in the CIAU charter. The Canadian Women's Intercollegiate Athletic Union formed by 1970.
In 2001, due to growing misconceptions about the name of the organization (laypeople associated the term "athletic" solely with track and field and "union" with labour movements), the CIAU changed its name to Canadian Interuniversity Sport (CIS).

While McMaster and the University of Toronto were early powers in the men's league (the U of T Blues won seven of the first 11 University Cups), no team would win more collegiate national-championships than the University of Alberta. The Golden Bears have taken 11 titles through to the 2002 season (in 1964, 1968, 1975, 1976, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1986, 1992, 1999 and 2000).

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