Chub Butters could be classed as one of Collingwood’s best all around athletes because he excelled in track and field, hockey, football, basketball and swimming.
While attending the Collingwood Collegiate he won the Intermediate and Senior track and field championships in 1932 and 1933. A foxy broken field runner on junior and senior high school football teams, he was a star half back with the 1933 Central Ontario Secondary Schools Senior champions in 1933 when his team defeated St. Catherines 12-9 in the final. Chub scored the winning touchdown.
In Inter-Collegiate track and field competitions he set school records in the 100 and 220 yard sprints and in the low hurdles.
His long amateur hockey career started in the old Collingwood Junior Town League when he captained the champion East End Club. At the age of 15, Chub made the Collingwood Junior O.H.A. team and after four years in junior company graduated to the Intermediate Collingwood Shipbuilders.
In 1937, he played for Geralton in the Northern Ontario Senior “A” series and then performed two seasons with Timmins in the same league. Returning to Collingwood in 1940, he played Senior “B” and Intermediate “A” for his home town until his retirement from hockey in 1952.
In 1951 he captained the Collingwood Shipbuilders, under coach Eddie Bush, to the provincial championship. He was outstanding in the finals series against Fort Erie.
He was considered one of Collingwood’s most outstanding swimmers and divers and in the summer of 1929, won the first Collingwood Aquatics Cup with five firsts in swimming seconds to Don McMinn, one of this town’s really great distance swimmers. He liked to remember how he played on the wing with Rabbi Fryer
when that great old timer played his last game against Midland in 1934.
He was also a better than average softball player with the Pros in the old Collingwood Softball League and he had a one-season fling at the game of lacrosse when the late Lou Dique tried to revive the game in 1927.
Category Archives: Athlete
BARRY BARKER
Barry Barker, as a multi-sport athlete, was inducted in the Collingwood Sports Hall of Fame, in 1996.
Barry Barker is probably most renowned for his years as a Collingwood Collegiate track and field star in the middle distances. His personal best times in the senior boys’ 800 metres and as a member of the school’s 4 X 400- metre relay team have not come close to being beaten in 20 years.
Among his accomplishments on the track were Georgian Bay region championships and a bronze at the Ontario championships in the senior boys’ 800 metre in 1976.
He also stands as the only CCI athlete invited to the world-class Maple Leaf Indoor Games, and was both a junior and senior athlete of the years at CCI. He also participated in football, basketball and cross-country running.
During his high school years, Barker also found time to play Jr. “B” hockey in Collingwood as a reserve netminder for the 1975-76 OHA finalists, and he reached the same stage the next year with the Alliston Jr. ‘C’ Hornets.
He has been coach of the CMHA Midget Rep. team throughout the 80’s and 90’s while playing on two local slo-pitch teams that went to the Canadian championships.