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| The battle of Ste. Genevieve |
History abounds in the small
river town of Ste. Genevieve.
Established in 1735 by French Canadian explorers, it was the first
permanent European settlement west of the Mississippi River in what is today
the state of Missouri, even older than its sister city 70 miles upstream,
St. Louis.
The days of the steamboats that
fueled a bawdy riverfront are long gone. However, locals still clutch close to
their collective historic souls the long running rivalry between the Valle
Catholic High School Warriors and the Ste. Genevieve High School Dragons. We are
not talking ACT scores or the National Honor Society here. No, this civil war
manifests itself in the pride of both schools, its athletics prowess.
Public education in Ste.
Genevieve has a rich and long history. Ste. Genevieve High School can trace it’s
genealogy all the way back to 1807 when community leaders established the first
school publicly charted by the Louisiana Territory. Valle High School opened in
1925.The school was named for Felix and Odile Valle, long time benefactors to
the parish.
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| A full house |
Football, as can be expected, is
the big stage yearly event. This fall, the Dragons knocked off the Warriors
7-6, for their first win over their neighbors since 2011. Valle holds the record
for state football championships, having been crowned 14 times. It was a big
win for the emerging Dragons whose current players have grown up with the monstrous
mystique of Valle football as a constant looming cloud of torment. But, not
this year, their razor- thin early season win gives the Dragons the town bragging
rights until next season. For the seniors on the winning side, they now hold a
life-long hammer of smugness over their future spouse, boss, employee, golf
buddies, in-laws and any other soul sitting in the losing sides’ bleachers.
Have no doubt; this small town rivalry has meaning.
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| Hold nothing back |
I love high school rivalries. I
think they bring out the best in all involved. Sports should not become
routine. It should be about passion. However, the relationship between any two
top-level teams who are rivals is one of complexity. School administrators are
on constant vigil knowing they're one misstep away from bad blood spilling over
into the educational process. Everyone I speak with in Ste. Genevieve claims
this local rivalry has never crossed the line of civility, has always been a
positive educational experience.
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| Aggressive on both sides of net |
All agree it will be a spirited encounter. Dragon senior
Jennifer Humbolt says that in her house the lines are clearly drawn. “My
step-dad is a big Valle booster and he has been letting me have it all week,”
she says. “Be he knows I can give it right back, like when we beat them this
year in football.” Humbolt’s current life is interwoven with the two school’s
rivalry. “By boyfriend plays football at Valle.” I asked if she heckled him
after the game. “No,” she says, “he was pretty down so I didn’t say anything.
But he knows I sat with our crowd and cheered for our team.”
Valle Senior Lainey Bauman says the volleyball rivalry is more personal amongst
the adults than the players. “We all get along fine. We see them (SGHS players)
all the time and we have all been playing club ball on the same team for
years.” Bauman’s senior teammate, Grace Eftink, relates that leading up to the game both sides ignore each other.
“We are fine with them but this week we don’t associate with them and they don’t
with us. After the game tonight, whoever wins will get their (digs) in, but it
is all in good fun.”
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| Coach Fallert watches play |
I ask both sides if they feel any pressure playing tonight’s
high stakes game. To a player, both sides say they are ready to go and let the best
team win. I ask the Valle contingent if they feel any undue outside pressure.
The consensus from the Warriors is a hesitant, “yes.” "So your parents may
ground you if you lose tonight?" I jokingly ask. Junior Rachel Loida tells
me that will not be needed, “If we lose tonight,” she says, “I am going to
ground myself.”
They all agree that you might love her deeply, but the
person you never want to lose to is your sister.
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| Coach Fallert |
Most in the community claim the
competitive climate based on athletics is not bitter. The two sides support each other, often as
economic and social allies. Most from both sides are members of the same
Catholic Church congregation. Marriages between
a Valle grad and a SGHS grad are common, splitting a family’s allegiance and at
times making the choice of where to educate their offspring complicated.
The two camps may come together
to sit side by side for Sunday morning worship, but tonight, they will be
at their tribal best as the Dragons and
the Warriors renew what has become a hotly contested battle for local volleyball
superiority.
Intentionally, they do not
schedule any regular season tournaments against each other and are placed in
separate classifications for postseason play. The two teams could possibly meet in the conference tournament to be held next week, but all agree that if they
do, it will be anti-climactic. Tonight’s match is winner take all.
Dragons head coach Jessica
Fallert finds the rivalry steeped in tradition. “I am from here,” she says. “I
grew up with this rivalry.” The 2001 graduate was a Dragon herself. “I don’t
think we ever beat them,” she recalls. Fallert is in her 5th season
as head coach. She spent her first four years of coaching as an assistant to coach
Dennis Drum.
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| Support for the serve |
Drum, the Dragons head coach for
sixteen years, is in attendance at this evening’s game. “Isn’t this great,”
Drum says about the game’s high energy atmosphere. “I have been through this a lot,” the retired coach says, “and it never gets old. It is always a big
positive for not only the kids, but the community as a whole. We don’t ever
want to lose what you see here tonight.”
Often troubled former heavyweight
boxing champion Mike Tyson once announced at a post-fight interview, after
losing his crown to Lennox Lewis, that it was time for him to “fade into
Bolivian.” Tyson’s most famous quote, though, was when he told the world how he
fueled his pre-fight rage, “I’m just ferocious. I want your heart. I want to
eat his children.” There are no cannibalistic intentions on either side of this
local rivalry. But, I can sense, neither side would hesitate to grab the last
piece of barbeque at the town picnic, leaving the other standing in line with
an empty plate.
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| Former Coach Dennis Drum |
The Valle Warriors are having a rare
down season. Always state contenders, this year they enter the stretch run of
the season with a 16-9 record, pretty solid for most school's, but the bar at Valle is set pretty high. Head Coach Nancy Fischer is unconcerned and
says her club is rounding into shape, jockeying for position to make a strong
postseason run. “We have so many injuries this year,” she states. “We get one back and another goes out. We
will have a new lineup again tonight. Still, I think this team has not played
its best, yet. No pressure on us now, I have told the girls. We are just going
to play loose and see what happens.”
Under the 36 year reign of Coach
Nancy Fischer, Valle has become a small school volleyball juggernaut. With 700
wins on her resume, she shows no sign of slowing down. A 1979 graduate of
Valle, Fischer embodies all the characteristics that personify the fierce pride
that radiates throughout Valle High School: confidence, energy, consistency,
loyalty and patience. She has led the
Warriors to 8 state final fours. She says the state hand she now holds is
composed of deuces wild. “We have been first twice, runner-up twice, third
place twice and fourth twice,” she laughs. In 2017 the Warriors finished the
year at 33-2-4, taking third at state. Spring graduation hit Valle hard.
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| Big time block |
Fischer says if she had been born
a decade earlier, a 1969 grad of Valle instead of a 1979 one, her life would
have been much different. “Oh no, no way would I have had the opportunities I
have had. We owe those who pushed for girls sports a lot of thanks. The girls
today have no idea what it was like back then. They don’t know because their mothers
never knew either, and I have coached a lot of mothers and daughters here, they
never had to fight for equal opportunity.”
Fischer is correct, a great load
of gratitude is owed by today’s female athletes and coaches to those 1972
visionaries on the front line of a revolution championing a society changing
movement. Many are today passing from the coaching landscape. Many paid dearly
for their activism. Their causes led to the upsetting of the status quo and were
not well received by the powers of the time. Despite the personal and
professional peril they placed themselves in; they lobbied loud and hard for
equality for the nation’s female athletes.
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| Intense action in set 3 |
Our educational institutions have
never been bastions of democracy. Without the militancy of these trailblazers,
the first wave of beneficiaries, like Fischer, would not have had the opportunities
that have shaped not only their lives, but also
the succeeding generations of girls they today mentor as coaches.
Title IX at its inception sent
tidal waves of fear through the established men’s athletic programs, in
particular, football. "A girl just can't do those things and still be a
lady," one of the nation’s most well-read sportswriters wrote in a 1972
newspaper column. Other law makers were gallantly progressive in their often
unpopular support of the intent of the law. History has now labeled them as heroes.
Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana defended and supported the law as simple fairness
and equal opportunity. "I do not read this as requiring integration of
dormitories between the sexes, nor do I feel it mandates the desegregation of
football fields. What we are trying to do is provide equal access for women and
men students to the educational process and the extracurricular activities in a
school," he told a suspect nation.
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| Well placed kill |
“We need to always make sure our
female athletes realize how lucky they are, that it was not always like it is
now, the opportunities that girls today take for granted. A lot of sacrifice
laid the ground for what we have now and we are all better because of it,”
Fischer states.
Neither of this evening’s head coaches had the teaching
profession as their first choice of occupation when they entered college.
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| Coach Fischer in warmups |
Fallert graduated from college with certification as an athletic trainer. She got her master’s degree at Columbus State University in Georgia. During her two year stay in grad school she served as the athletic trainer at a local high school. With her masters’ degree in hand she moved back to the St. Louis area taking a trainer’s job at St. Charles High School, 90 miles from her Ste. Genevieve roots. “I wanted to get back closer to home. I never thought much about teaching and coaching until I went to St. Charles,” she remembers. “The second year I was there the freshman (volleyball) coach came down with cancer and since I had a volleyball background, I volunteered to help out. I decided then that teaching is what I wanted to do for a living. I was hired the next year here at Ste. Gen and I have never regretted it. I learned a lot from Coach (Dennis) Drum as his assistant. I have also found Nancy (Coach Fisher) over at Valle to be a great help and resource.”
Nancy Fischer was put on this
earth to coach volleyball at Valle High School. She is a perfect fit. Yet her
long and successful career at Valle may have never come to be without what
seemed at the time to be mere passing comments.
“I planned on going to medical
school,” she relates to me as we sit in her just vacated Chemistry Lab 30
minutes before her 3:00 shift change when the 36 year veteran teacher/coach
will trade her lab coat for her coaching whistle.
“When I was in high school, I
played basketball and ran track,” she recalls. “No volleyball,” I ask with a
raised eyebrow. “I was the manager for the volleyball team,” says with a laugh.
“I went to Southeast Missouri State,” she says of the school located one hour
south of Ste. Genevieve in Cape Girardeau. “I played field hockey. I wanted to
be involved in sports and at the time, at that place, it was the only choice I
saw available.”
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| Father Nemeth |
“I really wanted to coach,”
Fischer tells me. “I knew that from a young age. But, I let a school official
my senior year (of high school) talk me out of it. I was basically told I was
too smart to waste my time as a teacher. I needed to do something impacting
with my life, like go to med school. I listened. Then, the summer after my
second year in college, I was home playing softball and I broke my wrist. When
I went back to college I still had the cast on and my advisor saw it and said,
‘you either need to be a doctor or be a jock. Make up your mind.” ’
Fischer says she knew the comment
was laced with sarcasm and a sublime academic put down of athletes. Regardless
of the intent, she took his arrogant advice and changed her major to Education
with an emphasis on Biology and Chemistry. A remark meant in sarcastic jest
turned out to be sage wisdom. “Best choice I ever made.” Now, 38 years later,
she says, “The man will never know how much his off the cuff remark has molded
my life.”
As Fischer’s college graduation approached,
her anxiety rose exponentially with each passing day. “I was in with a group of
eight others who had the same degree as me and by graduation everyone but me
had a job. I applied everywhere and got nowhere. One school even sent me a
rejection letter on a post card,” she says. “Today, it sounds funny, but at the
time I was getting desperate. I wish I had kept that post card.”
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| Coach Fischer |
Fischer’s job search had suddenly
gone from famine to feast and she needed to quickly make a decision. “All that
weekend I thought about it and I told my Mom Monday morning that I was going to
take the job at North County. I was going to call that afternoon and accept.”
“That Monday morning at school I
ran into Coach (Becky) Noble. She was a well-established coach in the area and
was the track coach at Farmington. Now, this is where if gets weird,” Fischer
says. “I always worked with Coach in the afternoon after school with track, but
I had never seen her before school, ever, until that morning. She asked me what
I was going to do and I told her I was going to take the North County job and
turn down Valle. She said, ‘I think that would be a mistake.’ That is all she
said and (then) she turned and walked away. Those few words from her instantly
changed my mind. I changed my future plans that fast. I called Valle and
accepted the job. At 22 years of age (four years removed from the school’s
student body) I was the head coach of volleyball, girls’ basketball and girls’track,
all the girls’ sports Valle (at the time) offered. If I had not run into Coach
Noble by chance that morning, my life would have taken a much different path.”
Have you ever thought about the road not taken, I ask? “Never,”
Fischer answered without hesitation. ‘My mom asked me once when I was in my
30’s if I had ever regretted the decision not to go into medicine? I
immediately said no. I did not even have to think about it. It is probably the
only time I have ever even thought of my decision. I have never looked back. I
am where I need to be and I get up every morning excited about school and
thankful for those two chance encounters
that changed my life.” And, I would add, changed the lives of two
generation of Valle Warriors who have had the good fortune to be the recipients
of her guidance.
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| The Anvil |
Coach Fischer gave me two pieces
of advice as we parted at 3 pm: Go to the Anvil on the town courthouse square
for dinner, the onion rings are worth dying for, she assured me, and be at the
gym by the start of the freshman gam at 5 pm, if I wanted a seat for the 7:30
varsity match. The coach was dead on, accurate on both.
We arrive in time for the
freshman game at 5 pm. The Junior Varsity game has a start time of 6:30. The
gym is loud and full. The visitors will claim wins in both of the preliminary matches,
but both are close and go three sets. From the first serve in the freshman
battle until the ball hits the floor for match point in the varsity tilt, the
fans are treated to over 4 ½ hours of spirited play.
In between the varsity and JV
match,Valle holds a dedication for its newly remodeled gym foyer where full
trophy cases are home to the Warriors numerous state championship awards. Fr.
Edward Nemeth is the head of both the Valle school and the parish. He has been
on the job for one year and is widely given credit for jump starting the parish
and the school’s finances. Coach Fischer tells me the priest has built a reputation of openness and
communication within the community. He addresses
the crowd while blessing the remodeled foyer. He makes a point of welcoming, “our
neighbors from up the hill.”
The raucous atmosphere I was
promised that afternoon by the players from both teams lived up to the pre-game
hype. Both student sections were filled to overflow, even for the freshman game.
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| Enthusiasm abound |
This was a match that from the first had the feel of one that would go down to the wire to determine the night’s winner. It sure did.
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| Not this time |
The second set was also played to
a mere standstill. The score was tied 9 times before the Dragons grabbed their
first lead of the game, 22-21. Valle secured back the ebbing momentum and took
the second round, on a Dragon miss hit, 25-23.
The rubber set, as the first two,
was a back and forth struggle for both teams. Much like two exhausted heavyweight
boxers staggering into the final round, both teams seemed to be lying
back, conserving energy. Valle jumped to a 12-9 lead, but had to bemoaning a
lost opportunity. The Warriors were their own worst enemy as five of the
Dragons first nine points had come on service errors. Down 21-24, Coach Fischer
called time out to rally her team from the brink of a loss. The Warriors came
out of the huddle invigorated and staved off three match point Dragon opportunities,
tying the deciding set at 24-24 and fittingly created the necessity of extra
play. The last momentum swing, however, went the way of the green jerseys,
securing the Ste. Genevieve win with two aggressive attacks, 26-24.
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| No losers, tonight |
I did.
In the future, when I think of
this evening, I will not remember the play on the court, perhaps even letting
time erase from my mind the final winner. What will be etched in my long term
memory will be the uplifting holistic experience. I will smile when recalling
the singing of the Star Spangled Banner by the Valle student led “unofficial
choir.” I will envision Chief Touchdown leading the Valle faithful in cheers. I
will appreciate the no shortcuts job a young coach is doing so well in
building a culture of success at Ste. Genevieve High School.
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| Post game congratulations |
Vince Lombardi is acclaimed by many
to be the greatest coach in football history. The long time Green Bay Packers leader
has the Super Bowl trophy named after him. He is widely remembered for his most
famous quote, “Winning is not everything, it is the only thing.” If the crusty
old gridiron coach had been in attendance at tonight’s game, he would have
softened his tone with admiration for the effort on both sides. Tonight, there
were no losers.
