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

state semifinal game to Onondaga, while Cambridge defeated Tuckahoe in the other semifinal . What’s the chance of two great teams meeting in an opener and then both reaching the state semifinals?

   Even my old high school, Ballston Spa, had a very interesting home-and-home intersectional series against Kellenberg Catholic of Long Island back in the 1980s.

   Fortunately, 2007 is no exception to this intersectional tradition.

   Some games are simply bizarre -– Schenectady, the eighth-largest school in the entire NYSPHSAA, is playing Millbrook, 463rd in size with one-seventh the number of students of Schenectady; Ithaca, the largest school in Section 4, is taking on Adirondack, which has one quarter of the students and is the 44th-largest school in Section 3; and Archbishop Walsh, a tiny Catholic school from Olean with a Class D enrollment, is taking on Southside, a Class A foe from Elmira. Huh, huh, and huh?

   There are some truly interesting ones, however, such as:

• Monroe-Woodbury, two-time state finalist, faces North Rockland, which has been to the state championship three times;
• St. Joseph’s Collegiate, traditionally Western New York’s best Catholic school, vs. St. Anthony’s, ranked nationally and winner of six straight downstate Catholic titles;
• And most of Aquinas’ schedule, which has games against all four of the large-school Western New York Catholics (St. Joseph’s, St. Francis, Bishop Timon and Canisius) and a pair of Section 4 traditional powers (Union-Endicott and Vestal).

    In addition, there are numerous Section 3-4 large-school matchups and lots involving Section 9 schools of all sizes.

   On behalf of New York State ’s high school football fans, I’d like to thank all of the coaches and athletic directors who looked beyond their backyards for ballgames. It makes the experience much more interesting.

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