The Welshman who arrived at twenty-two with a rugby ball, and spent six decades making sure Alberta had somewhere to play.
1959 a club · 1960 a founding member · 1990 a second team · 1994 a field cleaned by hand · 2010 a ground renamed · 2019 a legacy continuing.
Lynn Davies came to Canada from Wales when he was twenty-two. He brought the national sport with him. Over six decades he would mentor countless players, found two rugby clubs, build a ground, clean it by hand when he had to, design the crest they still wear, and hand the next generation a park that carries his name. Rugby in Sherwood Park does not exist in the shape it does today without him.
· 1960 ·
The crest Lynn designed
Davies was a player and a founding member of the Strathcona Druids. He played prop and he coached. In the club's breakthrough era, from 1966 to 1968, the Druids took three consecutive Edmonton and Alberta championship titles — and Lynn was there through all of it.
In 1968 he co-founded the Edmonton Rugbyfest with Davie Graham. He also designed the club crest — a Canadian maple leaf with a Welsh dragon at its centre, merging the two nations that made the Druids. In 1985 he led the team on an Atlantic Canada tour and came back with a new name: "the Cod Father." In 1989 he co-organized a New Zealand and Australia tour that took Alberta rugby to the other side of the world.
For a young club trying to prove it belonged on a map, Lynn was the compass.
In 1990, Davies approached a longtime Sherwood Park resident about helping start a new team. That team became the Sherwood Park Outlaws Rugby Football Club. In 1994 he secured a lease on a field formerly owned by the Edmonton Gun Club.
The lease required extensive renovations. The field was filled with broken clay pigeons, a giant forty-foot shooting tank, and lead-contaminated soil. Davies didn't hesitate. He started the work.
That work, done by a man who was already well past the age when most would have walked away from it, is the ground the club plays on today.
In 1997 the Edmonton Druids merged with the Strathcona Outlaws. The two clubs Lynn had helped build became one — and came home to the field he had cleaned three years earlier.
In July 2010, on the club's 50th anniversary, the grounds were renamed Lynn Davies Rugby Park. Not for a capital donation. Not for a plaque. For thirty years of building, scrubbing, mentoring, coaching, and showing up.
Lynn kept showing up. Longtime members remember him on the grounds with his tractors, maintaining the park he'd built.
Lynn always had a passion for youth rugby. He helped create what is now the biggest high school rugby tournament in Alberta — and the tournament is now named after him.
Every spring, 32 teams and more than 600 students take over the park for the Lynn Davies High School Rugby Tournament, hosted by McNally High School and the Druids. The 2026 edition, on April 24–25, is the 32nd annual.
The kids called him Santa Claus. He had the beard for it.
Lynn Davies passed away on Sunday, July 28, 2019. He was a proud Welshman, a founding member of the Druids, a key recruiter, a coach, a friend, and a mentor to generations of rugby players — including the ones who'd later name their ground after him.
In April 2026, the Druids received a $699,508 provincial grant from Alberta's Community Facility Enhancement Program. The money will build a new modular clubhouse and realign the pitches on the field Lynn cleaned by hand thirty years ago.
The park continues. The club continues. Every weekend, every age grade, every season. Lynn would have had the tractor out.