Rivals meet in final game of regular season for first time

It’s a staple in Helena, Great Falls and schools around the country.

The biggest high school football game of the year, the biggest rivalry, the one with all the local bragging rights on the line is played on the last week of the regular season. For the first time in seven years, Flathead and Glacier will be kicking off their crosstown game in Week 10, though it might not be permanent.

“It just happened to work out this year,” Flathead activities director Bryce Wilson said.

The crosstown game is situated in the season’s final week for each of the next two years on Class AA’s eight-year schedule matrix. It’ll be tough to keep it at that date after that, due to scheduling conflicts some caused by other last week crosstown games. With the Helena and Great Falls schools each requesting their rivalry games in Week 10, and crosstown matchups in Missoula and Billings, Kalispell’s game — the newest of them all — has last billing.

“That might be driving the fact that we won’t always be guaranteed it,” Wilson said. “It also depends on who we’re playing against. Sometimes it depends on how that all works out.

“We could ask for (an anchored week). We could say we’d like to have it the fifth week of the season. That’d be a great thing. I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to dictate the specificity of when we play the game.”

Even if the game reverts to an earlier week, the novelty of the final week rivalry isn’t lost on the coaches of both teams.

“It’s awesome that it is the last game of the year,” Glacier coach Grady Bennett said. “Hopefully we can keep it there as many years as possible. Hopefully we can get to the point where it comes down to this game to see who gets what (for playoff seeding).

“Our goal is to eventually have this game be, what the Helena vs. Capital game has been for so many years. That game comes down to the final game of the season between rivals, a lot of the times it’s for the No. 1 or No. 2 seed. Even this year.”

“It puts a lot of emphasis on the game,” Flathead coach Russell McCarvel said. “There was plenty before, but it makes it kind of a culmination of the season for sure. It’s a nice spot to have it.”

The game between the Braves and Wolfpack is quickly growing on the community. The game has drawn upwards of 5,000 fans the last few years. Despite some concerns that cold weather may keep some fans away, the rivalry is becoming a go-to game for many in Kalispell, regardless of when it is played.

“It’s a fun game,” Bennett said.

“It’s something that we never got to experience here for so long. I got to experience it for the first time when I played for the Griz against the Cats. There’s something different about a rivalry game. Kalispell’s always supported it so well. Every year it’s been a packed house.

“It’s a completely different atmosphere.”