The St. Catharines Falcons were a Canadian junior ice hockey team in the Ontario Hockey Association from 1943 to 1947. The team was based in St. Catharines, Ontario.
History
The Garden City was introduced to OHA Junior "A" Hockey in the fall of 1943 when the St. Catharines Falcons made their debut in the league. Rudy Pilous, a former St. Catharines Sr. "A" hockey player and his friend Jay MacDonald were inspired to bring a team to St. Catharines after watching a Memorial Cup game in Toronto's Maple Leaf Gardens in the spring of 1943 between the Winnipeg Royals and Oshawa Generals. The Falcons played in the Garden City Arena in downtown St. Catharines.
Pilous would be coach & general manager of the team, and MacDonald would be secretary & treasurer. Pilous raised the capital from talking six local businessmen (Pete Grammar, Ted and Os Graves, Tom Heit, Jack Leach, and Cal Wilson) into investing $500 each. He then took a trip back to his home town of Winnipeg, to hire players for the 1943-44 season.
The Falcons played their first game on November 13, 1943. The St. Catharines Falcons name came from a naming contest for the new junior team. The winner of the contest was a nine-year-old boy named Jimmy Stirrett from St.Catharines Ontario.
The team was so unsuccessful, that after two years, the St. Catharines Senior "A" Saints folded. In 1946-47 the club didn't make the playoffs and was in financial trouble. It looked like the end of Junior hockey in the city. In January 1947, George Stauffer, President of Thompson Products Ltd., stepped into the picture and bought the Falcons for $2,500, and renamed the team the St. Catharines Teepees.
Notable players
Doug McMurdy was awarded the Red Tilson Trophy as the most outstanding player during the 1944–45 OHA season.
List of Falcons' alumni who played in the National Hockey League:
- Armand Delmonte
- Val Delory
- Bing Juckes
- Nick Mickoski
- Bob Wood
Season-by-season results
Regular season and playoffs results:
Legend: GP = Games played, W = Wins, L = Losses, T = Ties, Pts = Points, GF = Goals for, GA = Goals against
{|class="wikitable" style="text-align:center"
|-
! rowspan="2"|Season !! colspan="9"|Regular season !! rowspan="2"|Playoffs
|-
! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! Finish
|-
|1943–44||26||15|| 9||2||32||0.615||125||103||1st OHA Group 2||Lost semifinal (Oshawa Generals) 4–2
|-
|1944–45||20||12|| 8||0||24||0.600||101|| 93||2nd OHA||Lost semifinal (Toronto St. Michael's Majors) 4–1
|-
|1945–46||28||14||14||0||28||0.500||133||123||4th OHA||Lost quarterfinal (Oshawa Generals) 3–1
|-
|1946–47||36|| 7||25||4||18||0.250||101||219||8th OHA||Did not qualify
|}