Rivalry gets added buzz with midgame relocation
You learn that quickly as a sports fan. As kids, my generation learned quickly that any time the Packers, Lions or Bears played a game, something special was about to happen. Players like Ray Nitschke, Alex Karras and Dick Butkus made sure of it.
If the Yankees and Red Sox or the Dodgers and Giants were playing, it was appointment television.
Not that other games didn’t have exciting plays and great performances. But there’s a whole new level of spice when it’s a rivalry game – the kind of game where a win can rescue an otherwise unmemorable season.
I learned that quickly enough when my family moved into the West Valley School District during my sophomore year.
Being new to the school, I had to learn a whole new set of rivalries with schools I’d never heard of before.
My geometry teacher, who later became my tennis coach, filled me in.
Rich Clark, a man I grew to admire greatly and truly loved playing for, had helped coach wrestling over the years and he happily erased the deficit in my knowledge of West Valley lore.
Back in the days of the Border League, West Valley’s main rival was Central Valley, and Clark always referred to them as “The Bear.” As in “That year we didn’t win a single game, but we beat The Bear twice, so it was OK.”
To his way of thinking, high school football games fell into two categories: regular games, and games against The Bear. It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to recognize that clue.
There were obvious ties between the schools that Clark loved to point out during rivalry week, and since it was a respite from the mysteries of the Pythagorean Theorem, we were a rapt audience for his stories.
He would point downstairs toward the school counselor’s office and launch into stories about Duane Ranniger, West Valley’s boys basketball coach. Ranniger had been a stellar athlete for The Bear.
His favorite, most colorful stories were from wrestling, and they almost always involved an overheated parent coming down onto the mat to protest a call, or lack thereof, from a key match.
Games with Central Valley remained big during my years at WV, though the schools had already begun moving in the opposite directions with enrollment. West Valley joined the Frontier League with schools closer to our own size and it grew harder and harder to schedule CV as a nonconference opponent.
Every team needs a rival to justify its existence, so WV adjusted its gaze a few miles north on Sullivan Road and set its sights on East Valley. As the crow flies, the Knights were even closer neighbors than The Bear.
And there were some similar old-school ties to be explored. West Valley’s fiery, young cross country and track coach Jim McLachlan, for example, was the son-in-law of East Valley’s Howard Dolphin.
West Valley-East Valley football games quickly began contributing to its new “rival” status. The air surrounding the game became electric and opposing sidelines thrilled at the chance to taunt each other across the field.
But that “electric” atmosphere was nothing to what last week’s WV-EV rivalry game generated.
To say I have never seen anything like it adds a whole new level to the term “understatement.”
The game was scheduled to be played at East Valley, and indeed it kicked off there.
Rivalry games can occasionally create a super-heated fan or three, but Friday night it was an overheated transformer that added too much buzz to the night air.
Officials pulled everyone off the field early in the second quarter for safety reasons. After a quick discussion about options for completing the game at EV, everyone piled into cars and buses and headed over to West Valley to finish the game.
A few quick cellphone calls rallied the troops at WV and the game played itself out – just a couple hours later than originally scheduled.
Spokesman-Review writer Jim Allen dubbed it a “Trent Avenue Twin Bill.”
The fact that West Valley won the game, 30-13, will eventually get lost to the fuzziness of long-term memory cells, but there will always be the legend of the 2015 game and how everyone pitched in to make it work.
It’s the kind of story Rich Clark would have loved to tell his students. And oh, how he would have loved the telling.