Gryphon Cup

Inaugural competition showing success in its early stages, engaging athletes.

Gryphons Athletics introduced a new intercollegiate competition this year, involving everything but playing.

The Gryphon Cup is an immersive program for varsity student-athletes to engage in healthy competition for a good cause: self-improvement and community-building. The Cup provides an opportunity to compete outside their sport, and help themselves and the community through segmented monthly standings for earning points through a set of three challenges:

1 - Academic Engagement

2 - Gryphons Supporting Gryphons

3 - Community Initiative

Academic Engagement points come from the amount of hours and meetings a student has worked on and attended the Student-Athlete Mentorship Program. Athletes earn points toward GryphonsSupporting Gryphons (GSG) when theyattend another team’s game. The amountthey earn is contingent on the importanceof the game they choose to attend. Thebulk of a team’s overall points generallycome from their Community Initiative,

where athletes engage with and provide services for the Guelph community.

The men’s rugby team seemed poised to win the inaugural Cup early on - their 4,500 points earned in the month of November via their $12,500 Movember donation gave them a 2,000 point lead. However, the swimming team chipped away each month, with consistently high attendance in the SAM program, supporting Gryphons at 23 different competitions, and being superstars in the community. Just in time for the Athletic Banquet, they had accumulated enough points to surpass men’s rugby by 825 points.

Highlighting the swim team’s historic win includes completing 1,500 SAM hours, raising over $3,000 for Mental Health, Big Brothers Big Sisters, Cancer Research, and Eating Disorder Awareness, and being named Volunteers of the Month by the Lakeside Hope House (where they spent over 200 hours volunteering throughout the year). The Swim team has set a high bar for future Gryphon Cup Winners.

“We wanted to document these things as a way to acknowledge our Gryphon efforts and successes off the field and especially in the community,” said Ann- Carolyn Lang, Gryphons women’s soccer athlete and one of the student leads for the Gryphon Cup, Lang noted that this friendly competition has had a positive impact on Gryphons Athletics.

“The best thing about this competition has been the collaboration between athletes and the various team representatives who come up with new ideas to engage athletes…and free pizza isn't such a bad thing either.” That’s right. If there was any doubt that these are student-athletes, each month’s winning team receives free pizza.

The first year of the competition was an incredible success with Gryphon athletes attending over 284 games or competitions, and raising over $20,000 for a variety of charities.

So what’s next for the inaugural GryphonCup? The second season of the GryphonCup is set to debut in September withall scores being reset. Who will be the most academically engaged, benevolent, and supportive Gryphon team in 2019-20? Follow @gryphonCup on Instagramto find out.

2018-19 Gryphon Cup Standings:

1 - Swimming2 - Rugby (M)3 - Soccer (W)4 - Hockey (W) 5 - Basketball (W) 6 - Figure Skating7 - Field Hockey 8 - Rugby (W)9 - Rowing 10 - Volleyball (W)

Contributions By: Rachel Weitz