Madison Newspapers wants you!

As a Prep Zone newsletter subscriber and/or someone has entered our contests in the past, we thought you’d want to know about our latest contest, in which we’re seeking the best high school sports rivalry in Wisconsin.

The two winning schools in the top rivalry will each get $250 to use for their athletic programs.

Vote!

You can vote once per day; the field will be narrowed to the finalists on Monday, Feb. 17.

A book about the football rivalry between Georgia and Georgia Tech is called Clean Old-Fashioned Hate. This blog is about high school rivalries, not college (for instance, Wisconsin vs. Minnesota) or pros (for instance, Packers vs. Bears), but the concept is similar.

The easiest way to define a high school sports rivalry is: Lose to this team, and your life is temporarily ruined, at least from the fan’s perspective.

Rivalries are big for everyone involved, but they’re bigger for fans than players. That’s because players have grown up playing each other, particularly in these days of year-round sports. Fans have less personal stake, but take it more personally. That seems odd, but it also seems to be the case. Players wear uniforms; fans dress up in team colors with various team accessories.

The State Journal’s list does not (or did not until I added it) the longest running high school football rivalry in the state, Ripon vs. Berlin. Nor does it include Stratford–Edgar or many others outside the State Journal’s readership area.

There are probably two kinds of high school rivalries. The first could be called Proximity Breeds Contempt — your closest rival in geography. The State Journal’s list includes Holmen–Onalaska, Middleton–Verona, De Forest–Waunakee, Lancaster–Platteville, Dodgeville–Mineral Point, Omro–Winneconne, and Kaukauna–Kimberly. That obviously also includes every in-city rivalry, such as Craig vs. Parker in Janesville, Central vs. Logan in La Crosse, Memorial vs. North in Eau Claire, and every combination of Madison high schools, but particularly East vs. La Follette and Memorial vs. West. Madison East vs. Madison West qualifies because they are the two oldest surviving high schools, since Central was replaced by Memorial in 1970.

The other rivalry could be called Quality Breeds Contempt. That’s a sport-based rivalry, when your number one target is the traditional power in the conference. In Southwest Wisconsin basketball, that’s Cuba City, whose teams have combined for 10 state titles since 1981. In football, that’s Lancaster and Hartland Arrowhead, among others. That kind of rival produces the game on which you base your season, whether you beat the best (over time, not a single season) program in your conference.

Both kinds of rivalry were featured in one 2003 football game, when undefeated Berlin, which was giving up 5 points a game, hosted undefeated Ripon, which was scoring more than 50 points per game. I got to announce that game, and it was a great game … at least from the perspective of the Ripon fans, because the Tigers won 49–0 on the way to their first state title. Four months later featured almost the reverse, with conference boys basketball champion Berlin beating Ripon in double overtime in the regional final on Berlin’s way to losing its sectional final to perennial state participant Seymour.

Beating rivals makes postseason accomplishments better. One of the favorite teams I ever covered was the 1987 Madison La Follette girls basketball team, which finished 9-11 in its regular season. Two of those nine wins were over Madison East, both in overtime (including an overtime shutout of East in the regular season finale). East, thanks to its foreign exchange student, finished higher than La Follette in the Big Eight Conference. So of course La Follette and East had to play in the regional final. And of course the game went to overtime. And of course La Follette won, this time on a buzzer-beater.

Up next was another archrival, Madison Memorial, which won the Big Eight title and beat La Follette twice in the regular season, but not the third time in the postseason. The sectional final then featured a new rival, Portage, which had beaten La Follette in the sectional final the previous year, but not this year.

The same thing happened two years later with another team, the Lancaster baseball team, which also had a 9-11 regular season. The first postseason game was delayed two days because of rain, a problem because of the WIAA’s pitching rule, which prohibits pitchers from throwing more than seven innings over three days, and the fact that instead of starting in three days, the sectional took place after the regional game.

After wins in the regional Thursday and the sectional semifinal Friday, Lancaster faced archrival Platteville, which had beaten the Flying Arrows like a hammer until their last regular-season meeting. Neither Lancaster nor Platteville expected to be in the sectional final anyway; both beat teams with twice as many wins. Lancaster got two innings out of its regional starter, then handed the ball to  his freshman brother for his first varsity pitching assignment, with only a state tournament berth at stake.

Lancaster overcame a 4-0 deficit to take the lead, lost the lead in the top of the seventh inning, and then won the game in the bottom of the seventh. I’ll never forget the Arrow fans’ reaction upon the winning run’s scoring — 30 seconds of wild cheering, followed by disbelieving silence.

One of the first high school basketball games I went to was my freshman year, a huge game between La Follette and Janesville Craig, won by the Lancers on two free throws with five seconds left. A month later, the two teams faced each other in the state Class A semifinals, where Craig ended La Follette’s season in their third meeting. Playoff arrangements more often than not follow conferences, but not always, and so for years Madison schools have been in one sectional, while Janesvilles Craig and Parker and Beloit Memorial have been in another.

Readers of this blog know what happened two years after that. La Follette, Parker and Madison West all tied for the 1981-82 Big Eight boys basketball title. Parker went a different postseason direction and lost to Lake Geneva Badger, but La Follette and West’s third meeting was in the sectional semifinal at La Follette. Each team had a legendary coach — West’s Jim Stevens vs. La Follette’s Pete Olson. West had three 6-foot-7 starters. La Follette had guard Rick Olson, who would start four seasons at Wisconsin, plus Steve Amundson, who played at Western Michigan, and Tim Jordan, who played football for Wisconsin and the New England Patriots.

The La Follette gym (which should be named for Pete Olson) was packed beyond capacity, hot and loud the entire 32 minutes of play. La Follette trailed 59–51 with 1:30 remaining, then, as the gym impossibly got louder, outscored West 13–4 over the final 90 seconds (in, remember, the era before the three-point shot), topped off with two free throws with 11 seconds remaining to continue La Follette’s postseason and end West’s. Given the reaction after the game, you would have thought La Follette had won state, which took another week to accomplish.

Six years later, I changed from student to reporter, and watched La Follette knock off West 43–41 in the sectional semifinal, this time at West. One year after that, the reverse occurred, with West’s ending La Follette’s season in its own gym. Two years later, West beat La Follette to get to state. That’s what rivalries are about.

One of the unwritten rules of sports is that if your rival gets farther in the postseason than you do, you should root for your rival. I have never understood that, not because of high school, but because of my experience as a fan of the inept 1970s Wisconsin football teams. You could set your watch to the annual annihilation of the Badgers by Michigan and Ohio State, one of which would then end up in the Rose Bowl. If you had to sit through 56–0, 59–0 and 55–2, why would you then root for the team that obviously (to a young fan) ran up the score on your team?

This became a brief issue in between La Follette state appearances. West went to state in 1981 with a star guard who previously played at Sun Prairie. The players’ parents were divorced; one lived in Sun Prairie and the other lived in West’s attendance zone. In the days before open enrollment, it was controversial for a player to shift from one household to another to play for a better program. My geometry teacher, who bled cardinal and gray, announced before state that while we should ordinarily root for a conference team at state, it would be OK to not root for West because West was gaming the system.

The theory, I guess, is that team A beats team B and goes on far in the postseason, that makes team B look better in retrospect. That’s one way to look at it; another perspective is that team B was just an obstacle in A’s way. If you were a Packers fan in the 1970s, that theory led you to watch the Vikings lose three Super Bowls.

I have since devised (or stolen from somewhere else) what I’ll call the Utility Theory of Rivalry. I came up with this during the 1993 and 1998 college football seasons for the same game, Michigan and Ohio State. In each of those years, the right team needed to win for Wisconsin to have a chance to get to the Rose Bowl. So in 1993 Badger fans rooted for Michigan, and the Wolverines won. In 1998 Badger fans rooted for Ohio State, and the Buckeyes won.

So when should you root for a rival? When that rival’s winning benefits your team. Not otherwise.