With the 2007 high school football season starting in less than week, it’s easy to get wrapped up in all of the on-field hype. Sometimes I like to look beyond that.
One of the real joys of high school athletics is that it brings together schools, teams and individuals that probably would have never competed. While a vast majority of games match up local rivals or teams in the same section, occasionally we are privileged to get some very interesting out-of-section matchups.
My favorite example comes from a Federation championship basketball game in 1984 which matched up Charlotte, a Rochester city public school, against the Dalton School, an elite private school from Manhattan.
When else could the kids from the troubled upstate inner city ever get a chance to face kids from a high school where not only do 100 percent of graduates go to college, but going to anything below the Ivy League is a failure? The game ended up in a narrow, 47-46 victory for Charlotte, but more importantly it showed the real value of high school sports.
While intersectional football games may not be as widespread here in Section 2 as they are in other places, two regular-season games stand out in my memory.
In 1982, Shenendehowa and Liverpool were two of four teams who ended the season ranked No. 1 in the New York State Sportswriters Association large- school ranking. The next September, they met in the opener at the Carrier Dome; in probably the first appearance by a Section 2 team in the Dome, Shenendehowa posted a 28-19 victory that did wonders for a school that had previously been known mostly as a local powerhouse.
Twenty years later, Cambridge and Lyons, small-school powers located several hundred miles apart, hooked up for an opening day game at neutral Rome Free Academy; Lyons rushed for nearly 400 yards but Cambridge, behind all-state quarterback Zack Luke, managed to pull out a 23-20 win. Ironically, both teams were still playing 11 weeks later, as Lyons lost a tough
