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RINGETTE WOULDN’T HAPPEN WITHOUT OUR VOLUNTEERS

Thank you to our coaches, managers, trainers, minor officials and more for helping to maintain play on the ice.  Off the ice, our ringette association depends on a team of volunteers on our executive committee and we are seeking additional volunteer resources to help us continue growing and being successful!

With our growth into the Stouffville area, we will need to fill some open spots. Many of our current volunteers joined us early in the time that their players began playing Ringette. Currently, several of our volunteers have players who will be moving on to the next stages of their lives and will no longer be as involved in ringette.

We are looking to fill the following positions for the upcoming season:

• Bear Cub Convenor - educates and informs the parents and players just beginning in ringette have as much information as they need and sends out reminders regarding attendance and anything pertinent to their team
• Equipment and Inventory Manager
• Athlete Representative
• CTR Coordinator
• Secretary

Nickel City Nostalgia: World’s longest-serving active referee got his start in Sudbury

Author of the article:Randy Pascal For The Sudbury Star
Published Jan 05, 2024 • Last updated Jan 05, 2024 • 4 minute read

 

Gerald Lamoureux, right, with Steve Hamilton, a longtime friend and colleague from North Bay. 

Typically entrusted with carrying the equipment and such on the four-block trek from their Eastern Avenue homestead to the neighbourhood park, the eldest of six children was pressed into service of a different kind at the age of 13.

 

“One day, a ref didn’t show up, so my mother gave me a whistle and said to me, ‘I will tell you when to blow it’,” Lamoureux said with a laugh.

A half-century later, he’s maintained said whistle in hand, one of the more familiar faces for those involved with ringette who can recall with ease the challenges of those early outdoor games.

 

“I am the longest serving, still active (ringette) referee in the world,” Lamoureux states quite confidently.

Making the move from Sudbury to Toronto in 1985 and residing in the Don Mills area for quite some time now, the son of former Sudbury mayor Maurice Lamoureux officiates a much different version of the game from the one in which he first got his footings.

 

“Back then, you would play one period and then everyone would go inside for hot chocolate,” Lamoureux recalled with a laugh. “We would go back out and scrape the ice for the second period. And when the game ended, it was back in for hot chocolate.”

While his reasons for remaining involved for decade after decade likely morphed over time, the earliest attraction was one that pretty much every young teenage boy could relate to.

 

“It’s all girls playing ringette (or at least was at that time) and let’s be honest — there were lots of pretty ones,” Lamoureux chuckled.
“Seriously though, the sport was a good sport. Lots of action and fast; you learned on the go. And I got to go to all of the different playgrounds across the city.”

 

Within a three- to four-year period, those boundaries were expanded, the youngster taking his love of travel to another level entirely.

 

“Back then, if a team was going to travel (to a tournament), you had to bring a referee,” Lamoureux said. “It was still so new and we didn’t have too many refs.”

Gerald Lamoureux, left, poses for a photo with fellow official Amanda Keeler.

To this day, the memories of his very first rep tournament in Oshawa spring quickly to mind, the thrill of what taking that next step meant to the young man who would graduate from Cambrian College with a degree in the bilingual business administration program that easily predated the advent of College Boreal.

 

“I was meeting other referees, seeing the game at a different level,” he said. “This was cool.”

 

Drawing on an interest in organizational governance that ran through much of the family, Gerald wasted little time furthering his development via his involvement as a regional referee-in-chief, while still relatively young.

 

Even as he expanded his personal ringette spectrum to incorporate many years of coaching, most often balancing between his duties behind the bench and on the ice, Lamoureux demonstrated the character traits that would lead to regular appearances at provincial championships and hundreds of games, pretty much every year.

 

 

And as Lamoureux offered input with various rule discussions, his earliest days in the sport were glaringly apparent.

 

For as much as he has garnered some hardware along the way, beginning his coaching journey with his mom, jumping aboard with a provincial team in Onaping Falls a few years later and lending a helping hand with the Scarborough association after his departure from Sudbury — “ringette was my social connection when I moved to Toronto” — Lamoureux insists that he is far more well-known in the circles of this revitalized sport by virtue of his time donning the stripes.

 

“People know me more as a ref,” he said. “I taught and evaluated referees.”

Despite game appearances that number easily in the thousands and a chronological clock that belies his youthful exuberance when he steps on the ice, Gerald Lamoureux continues to do so — and is more than happy to do it.