Ottawa has a long and proud sport tradition, and in this ongoing series, we present highlight moments and figures from our local sport history. The Ottawa Sport History Highlight series is produced collaboratively by the Ottawa Sports Pages and the Ottawa Sport Hall of Fame, which has welcomed almost 300 inductees dating back to its establishment in 1968.

Ottawa will soon be hosting Canada Soccer’s 2026 National Championships from Oct. 8-12 at Julian de Guzman Park and Matt Anthony Field, with the host Gloucester teams set to compete for the men’s amateur Challenge Trophy and the women’s amateur Jubilee Trophy. In this Ottawa Sport History Highlight Series feature, we look back on the first time a local team captured a Canadian crown with the 1997 and 1998 Nepean United Spirit.

When Kim Gamble and Whitney Forsyth remember the 1997 Canada Soccer National Championships in Calgary, they’re both abruptly possessed by the frosts of yesteryear.

“It was freaking cold. It was so gosh dang cold!” Forsyth recollects.

The Ontario Cup-winning Nepean United Spirit were greeted with an uncordial snowstorm in early October upon touching down out west. Their first practice was a mad rummage through “a couple feet” of snow.

Forsyth’s goalkeeper’s mitts did little to insulate her from that blasted cold. She was made to wear one of those insulated warmers quarterbacks unashamedly clip around their waists despite their close resemblance to unstylish fanny packs.

All in all, it was tremendous fun.

The Spirit were the first Ottawa team to win the Ontario Cup and represent the province at national championships on either the men’s or women’s side. Soon after, they became the first Ontario team to claim the Jubilee Trophy, besting the defending champion Vancouver UBC alumni in a hard-fought final.

“The real essence of sports was still there,” Gamble said in a retrospective interview with the Ottawa Sports Pages’ Keiran Gorsky. “A lot of great people, a lot of great memories… it was just one of those special teams.”

Given their exceptional firepower, Nepean might not have needed a great goalkeeper to top the province – in 17-year-old Forsyth, they got one anyway. Originally suiting up as a baseball catcher, Forsyth showed a distinct lack of fear for being pelted with spherical objects. The transition to youth soccer with the Gloucester Hornets came quite naturally.

The youngest on a team largely composed of active and graduated University of Ottawa Gee-Gees like Gamble, Forsyth was one of a handful of players the team would lose the following season to NCAA programs. For now, she was a gut punch to any team that made the unlikely trek into the Spirit’s third.

“We ride on Whitney’s shoulders,” co-head coach Andy Nera told the Ottawa Citizen’s Lisa Burke (now Wallace) before nationals.

She never felt babied or belittled despite the 10-year age difference between her and the oldest players on the Spirit – perhaps because she was one of the bigger players on the team; perhaps because she was willing to loudly direct the backline.

At times, there wasn’t a great deal to do. Nepean went a perfect 15-0 during their regular season in Ottawa. Forsyth recorded five consecutive clean sheets in the Ontario Cup, culminating in a 3-0 rout of St. Catharines in the finals.

In practices, though, the team was content to give her a proper workout. Forsyth had the likes of national university MVP Julie Gareau and future Canadian international Danielle Vella to contend with, not to mention a young Kristina Kiss the following season.

“It was a great experience for me being the younger one and learning from them and playing with them,” said Forsyth, who now lives in Aurora, Colorado, but still keeps in touch with her old teammates.

A number of Spirit players have continue to serve in soccer coaching and administration roles following their high-performance playing careers, helping to shape the sport locally.

Kiss, who enjoyed a Hall of Fame career and helped Canada to its best-ever finish at a FIFA World Cup, is the best known of the bunch and currently serves as Technical Director of Ottawa Rapid FC.

Gamble helped run the Boston Renegades and Cape Cod Crusaders in Massachusetts. She also helped found the original Ottawa Fury of the USL W-League, which absorbed much of the Spirit’s personnel upon its establishment in 2000. The 2012-champion Fury women were also inducted into the Ottawa Sport Hall of Fame in 2025.

“I love the game and I love what the game can bring to your life,” Gamble highlighted. “The people that you surround yourself with, the memories that you have, and the bonds you create, those can’t be changed.”

Nera would coach the first iteration of the Fury in the North American semi-professional league and remains a close friend of Gamble’s to this day. Forsyth misses no opportunities to mention how “awesome” he was in passing.

Under Nera, the Spirit’s band of strong personalities coalesced instead of clashing. Forsyth remembers Nera as a brilliant motivator with a no-nonsense mentality. She also remembers how often he would give referees an earful.

“He was a really nice man… but Andy had no problem getting after the refs if the refs were making stupid calls,” she laughed.

Nepean’s perfect season hit its first real snag heading into October National Championships. Vella, the team’s star forward, saw her year come to an end when she tore her ACL during a practice with the Gee-Gees, who’d won the Canadian university championship in 1996. Up to that point, Vella had never missed a single game in her six years with the Spirit.

“She’s sort of like the quarterback,” Nera told Burke. “We will have to play a bit of a different style without her.”

Though she still made the trip to Calgary to cheer from the sidelines, Gamble says Vella still dislikes being reminded of her untimely injury. In her absence, and a few more Gee-Gees who opted to stay with their university team, the Spirit were far from 100%.

In the freezing cold, the ball moved a little like a lumbering rock. They opened with a 2-1 win over Lakeshore SC (Quebec) and followed it up with a 6-0 thrashing of Saint John Fundy United (N.B.). Forest Hills United SC (N.S.) held them to a 1-1 draw in their final group stage fixture.

As everyone anticipated, the Spirit were pitted against the defending champions from UBC in the final. They were a frightfully big bunch, Gamble recalls, and loaded with national team talent. By that fateful Thanksgiving Monday, the weather had finally warmed to something seasonable, and the Spirit got a boost from seven Gee-Gees who were able to fly to Calgary in time for the big game.

It was a predictably physical affair, scoreless through regular time. Ten seconds before the game could go to penalty kicks, Gareau scored what might go down as the greatest goal in the competition’s history. From a corner kick, she curled in an Olimpico. Nepean won 1-0.

“It was a suicide shot,” Gareau told the Calgary Herald’s Sasha Nagy after the game. “I knew there was less than one minute left and I didn’t want it to go to penalty shots.”

“Just boom,” Forsyth remembered watching from the other side of the field. “You were almost like, ‘Did that just happen? Did that really just happen?’”

It remains one of the fondest memories in Gamble’s and Forsyth’s careers. Forsyth would depart for the University of Tulsa before the Spirit repeated as champions the next year, again with a win over UBC in the final.

In their final year of existence, Nepean became the first team to win three consecutive Ontario Cups. They fell just short of a third Jubilee Cup Final appearance when they fell 3-2 to the eventual 1999 champions Edmonton Angels SSC. After a certain point, their local league seemed an insufficient challenge for such a talented group.

“I think that was part of the reason we eventually moved on,” Gamble indicated. “We never took the success in the league as our success overall.”

The Fury would play 15 seasons in the USL W-League. More than 60 members of national senior women’s teams would pass through their ranks, including 30+ for Team Canada. Through mergers, Nepean United eventually became Ottawa South United, which has in turn produced numerous youth and senior national team players.

“It was almost a stepping stone into what we wanted to accomplish,” Gamble summarized.