Time has eroded many high school football rivalry games that were October mainstays
Over the last 25 years, nearly all of the longtime football rivalry games that once punctuated the final weeks of the regular season have faded away.
Sleepy Hollow and Ossining rarely get together any more. Iona Prep and New Rochelle no longer spend Thanksgiving Day together. Carmel and Mahopac have been sidelined by a shift in enrollment. Of the top 10 rivalry games featured in a Gannett Westchester Newspapers pullout ahead of the 1989 season, just one remains relevant.
Rye-Harrison still moves the needle historically, competitively and emotionally.
“It’s hard to imagine we’ve lost so many of those games,” said longtime North Rockland athletic director Joe Casarella, who played in the Rye-Harrison game before he won 255 football games as head coach of the Red Raiders.
Rye-Harrison led the list in 1989.
What's long been referred to as "The Game" was followed, in order, by Sleepy Hollow-Ossining, New Rochelle-Iona Prep, Greely-Fox Lane, White Plains-Stepinac, Carmel-Mahopac, Mount Vernon-New Rochelle, John Jay Cross River-Fox Lane, Dobbs Ferry-Hastings and John Jay Cross River-Kennedy Catholic.
All of those rivalry games are long dead or barely relevant.
The biggest reason for the drastic landscape change is shifts in enrollment. NYSPHSAA member schools compete within classifications that are determined by a yearly head count.
“We got bigger at Ossining and were moved up to Class AA,” said Dan Ricci, who played for the Pride and coached football at the school for three decades. “The enrollment at Sleepy Hollow stayed pretty much the same. That’s when we discontinued it.”
Playing a crossover against smaller or larger rivals is a logistical challenge because of the limited number of games football teams play each season. There's little room for non-league contests.
The calculus used to determine playoff seeding can be thrown off, as well.
Sleepy Hollow-Ossining dates to 1955. The series produced some memorable moments but went on a lengthy hiatus starting in 1991 when the enrollment numbers changed. The football programs at both schools also lost momentum over the years.
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When both teams finish outside the playoffs and there is room to add on a game, the schools do occasionally reunite.
“I was a senior in 1982 and (we were) 2-7 going into that game,” Ricci said. “They were like 7-2 and going to a bowl the next week. I still remember it, we lost 22-18, got stopped at the goal line. Every game, it didn’t matter what the records were, it was always close. You could have a bad season and it wouldn’t matter if you won that game. Both towns came out. We used to have to bring in bleachers from the local parks to seat everybody. This is before lights.
“We were warming up before a game against Sleepy Hollow in 2008 and the fans were already packed in. Our kids were shocked. I remember the look on the kids’ faces. They couldn’t believe it because they had only heard about the rivalry growing up.”
Enrollment shifts also claimed the Mahopac-Carmel rivalry.
Thousands of local fans used to sit shoulder to shoulder watching Iona Prep-New Rochelle and White Plains-Stepinac while the fixings were cooking on Thanksgiving Day.
“It was some kind of rivalry,” said former New Rochelle coach Lou DiRienzo, who’s now on staff at Iona Prep. “That game was on WPIX for years before I got there. It was a tremendous event. I coached in 10 of those games. We won five. They won five. It was a celebration being there on Thanksgiving Day. It was a tremendous rivalry that brought out a lot of people, but we had rules limiting the number of games you could play, so if you finished in October, you had to wait around to play that game and that was never fun.”
There were conflicts when the NYSPHSAA tournament began, too, but the waiting eventually brought the game to an end 2002.
White Plains-Stepinac followed suit, officially ending the series in 2017.
A lack of competition resulted in other favorite rivalry games losing relevancy over the years.
New Rochelle-Mount Vernon ranks among the oldest rivalries in the country dating to 1897, but that history isn't enough to spark a response. The Huguenots seem to win in runaway fashion every single year so there isn't much to get excited about.
"The No. 1 aspect of a rivalry is location," Casarella said. "The communities are usually close to each other and there’s usually a lot of interaction between them. And the fact that they build over years and years is really important, but they have to be competitive. You can't have one team going 80-10 and have a strong rivalry."
While some of the longtime rivalry games will be missed, there are several new showdowns creating headlines.
Good luck finding a game that generates the heat of Stepinac-Iona Prep. That rivalry dates to 1950 and has never been stronger.
"It’s a rivalry off the field, too, but we’re all still boys at the end of the day," Crusaders running back Jordan Osbourne said. "We try to keep it to football, but there is always going to be chatter. It’s like a movie. Everyone is so psyched for that one game. And when it comes to the game, you just have to play ... and win."
Somers-Yorktown is another neighborhood rivalry that inspires a lot of noise.
"It’s like a hostile environment for that game.," Tuskers quarterback Mac Sullivan said. "Yorktown-Somers is the game you always circle on the calendar and this year it’s going to be even bigger with both teams coming in with good records. I think it will be a hyped-up, ready-to-go kind of game."
Somers and Yorktown close out the regular season next week.
There is potential for a postseason rematch, too, which is a call-for-backup, get-there-early kind of game.
Mike Dougherty covers high school football for The Journal News and lohud.com. Follow along on Twitter/X @hoopsmbd.
This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: lohud high school football: What happened to the rivalry games?
