When Ron Ralph moved with his family from Kentucky to take over managership of the Canadian Mist Distillers in Collingwood in 1968, he had two things in mind.

He was going to see that his firm would become a good corporate citizen and that
he, himself, would be an active private citizen in the town of his adoption.

Interested in all phases of sport in his native Kentucky, he continued to dominate the sports scene in the a Collingwood as a competitor and an organizer.

Ron was the driving force behind the organization of the Georgian Bay Slo-Pitch Softball League, now one of the longest and best in Ontario. He served as President of the League in 1973 and 1974 and become the first chairman of the infamous Collingwood Summerfest Slo-Pitch tournament, an annual event which attracted fifty teams from all parts of Ontario, including a couple of clubs from the USA.

Ron played basketball in the Kentucky Little League up through high school. His team later won the junior district title and the regional championship in the senior ranks.

He played baseball for the 504 Paratroop Battalion at Fort Bragg, North Carolina and later played senior baseball in the Kentucky Tri-County League for the Beals Red Sox.

He organized a Babe Ruth League in Owensboro,  Kentucky. Ron coached a team, built the playing field, umpired and rustled up the team sponsors. For this project, Ron received the Kentucky Colonel Award. When he moved to Collingwood, Ron played fastball in the Blue Mountain League.

He found that fastball in Collingwood was as good as the US but preferred slo-pitch as it seemed more like baseball strategy and more all-around action.

In the summer of 1970, he was able to get a group of men to play challenge slo-pitch games and the following year organized the first Slo-Pitch Industrial League with the able assistance of John Hill and Tommy Murray. He continued direct involvement in the league until 1978, during which time he built the Canadian Mist team to championship caliber in the newly formed Ontario Slo-Pitch Association.

Along with Frank Smalley, Ron started the Collingwood Minor Baseball League in 1972. He coached several teams in the league for a couple of years before he was elected president of the league in 1974. The league grew by leaps and bounds and Collingwood hosted the All Ontario Bantam tournament in 1975.

A Collingwood team won the provincial title in 1979.

The Builders section of a Sports Hall of Fame is reserved for men and women who have contributed time, talent and leadership to the organization and
development of sports.

Generally, these dedicated men rarely hear the plaudits of the crowd; never see their names in headlines and most often are forgotten entirely.

Such a man was the late Lou Stapleton, the beloved former principal and physical education teacher at the Collingwood Collegiate. He is the one man who definitely had left his mark in the development of every phase of high school athletics in the Georgian Bay District. You of this generation, who never know Lou Stapleton, were deprived of the influence of this very special man.

He possessed the gift that enabled him to bring out the most and the best in every
athlete. His keen sense of sportsmanship and fair play left a lasting impression on every student fortunate enough to come under his guidance on a football field, a baseball diamond, the gymnasium or in track and field competition.

He drilled his junior and senior football teams in after school sessions that lasted until after dark and then he had them back at night for blackboard talks.

He was the man responsible for the formation of the Georgian Bay Secondary Schools
Athletic Association and he became its first president. When Stapes first came to Collingwood, football was only two bucks and a kick. But in less than two years he had his players away ahead of Barrie, Owen Sound, Midland and Orillia in the fine points
of the modern game.

His best football team was built around Jack Portland in 1929 and the squad won the
Ontario Secondary Schools championship. His track team brought national acclaim when he brought a small squad of ten jumpers and runners of the C.N.E. Intercollegiate title.

Lou Stapleton was a giant in the athletic field but he died all too soon. His untimely death took place in 1938 at the height of his brilliant career.

Red Fawcett was born in the South End of Collingwood, a section of the town that
produced many great athletes over the past eighty-years.

An exceptionally clean athlete, but an aggressive one, Red starred at every game
he chose to play; Hockey, softball, basketball, football and track and field.
He played them all and he gave everything he had in every contest.

I remember him when he was a freckle-faced kid of eleven or twelve. We kept chasing him away from the ball diamond because he was too small but he kept coming back. He made the South End team with players six years his senior.

Red did not pursue hockey after he left the junior ranks, other than town league,
due to business pressure, but he could have made the Intermediate “A” club anything up until his early thirties.

He possesses a wicket shot from the wing and was an artist at picking the top corner of the net from what seemed to be an impossible angle.

He was always up with the first three scorers in the town league but I think his greatest winning goal came on the night of March 12th, 1934. It was the third and final game of the play-offs between his West End club and the old Central Tigers. The
score was tied at 4-4 and Red had taken a rough ride for 58 minutes from a trio of rough customers-Don Haney, Frank Mirlees and Bill Calvert.

Red knew there was nothing to do but “take it” because Buck Walton was the referee and Buck was never one to quibble over a bit of rough stuff. It had to be a deliberate butt-end, a cross check across the mouth or a twenty-foot charge before Buck would hand out a penalty. The clock said 20 seconds to go when Red stick handlers through the entire Central team and blazed a shoulder high shot past Bob Patton for the winning goal and the championship.

That was the same year that the Town League All-Stars took on the Intermediate
“A” team and beat then 6-5. Red had a pretty fair share in that victory. He scored three goals, including the winner. The year 1934 was a pretty good year for Red from a sports standpoint. After starring on the championship hockey team he helped the old Collingwood Grads win the Blue Mountain Softball League title. He pitched five games for the Grads that season and also played centre field shortstop when he wasn’t on the mound. His batting average was exactly .400, second highest in the league.

Red was not the fastest pitcher in Collingwood softball history but he had perfect
control. In the outfield he could go back deep for the long hits or come in fast to pick low liners of his shoe laces. He could throw strikes from centre field to the plate. When playing the infield he dug everything out of the dirt between second and third and could knock the first baseman down with that peg across the infield.

In the many years I watched him play hockey and softball, I never once heard him
dispute the decision of a referee or an umpire.

It was the same when he played for the Collingwood Collegiate.

A steady block of granite on the line in football, a tough guard on the basketball team and a steady point winner on the track and field team. Red Fawcett was a gentleman and a sportsman. Need we say more?  He died in 1972 at the age of sixty.