Bob McCrudden

We Are The Champions: Bob McCrudden came to Sheridan almost 50 years ago — and never left.

Around his neck, Bob McCrudden wears a pendant with the date he technically began his retirement from Sheridan: Dec. 22, 2000. More often than not, however, McCrudden can still be found on the campus he loves, sharing his experience with the community and volunteering his time with projects such as the upcoming Night of Champions in September.

McCrudden started at Sheridan the first year it opened, when there were a mere 385 students. “We were very close because everybody knew everybody, pretty much,” he remembers. “On Friday afternoons, when there were hockey games, by and large, every student in the school would go to watch.” An active sports enthusiast and a cross-country runner on the provincial-championship winning team in 1968, McCrudden was inspired by friend Steve Blundy, (“my cohort in crime”, he jokes), to get more heavily involved in Sheridan Athletics. “Because we were such a small group of teams, if one team was playing, the other teams were there — especially when we started winning championships,” says McCrudden, who, in the 1970s, became a manager of the men’s hockey team.

When McCrudden graduated from business administration, computer systems design — the only student to do so, since that discipline became the computer studies division the next year — he started working in the administration department scheduling classes, a role he would hold for the next three decades. He also continued an active role in mentoring young athletes. “Good athletes are good people - it’s not that different from what it is today,” he says.

Thinking back on his time playing and managing sports at the school, what McCrudden remembers most is being attracted to the camaraderie of the athletic community at Sheridan. He still gets together with fellow team members to golf, have dinner occasionally and, every second week in June for the past 18 years, golf in a tournament now called the Moker Memorial in honour of Blundy, who passed away in 2014.

Now, although he’s been retired from the school for 17 years, McCrudden is still lending a helping hand. Fifty years and 10 days after he first walked through the doors at Sheridan for the first time, McCrudden will celebrate with his teammates once more at the Night of Champions on Sept. 29, 2017, which will honour athletes from a half century of Sheridan Athletics. McCrudden has been working furiously to track down team members – he estimates that since December, he has made 1,000 calls and found 160 people, putting his decades of honed scheduling skills to work in fitting all the moving parts of a complicated event together. “It’s a labour of love,” he says. “Fitting the bits and pieces together is what I thrive on. It’s who I am.”