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| During the 2004 and 2005 football seasons, St. Teresa, led by Sean Dunning, pictured, and Maroa-Forsyth played four times. Each won twice, including one playoff win apiece against each other. During that stretch, the rivalry burned at its hottest. Tonight's game between the Bulldogs and Trojans is likely the last in the rivalry, at least for the foreseeable future. |
Maroa/St. T Rivalry Coming to an End
When Tim Brilley was a senior at St. Teresa in 2000, playing Maroa-Forsyth was just another game.
Five years later, St. T/Maroa was the premiere rivalry in Central Illinois. For eight years, it was the most anticipated regular season game in the H&R area -- the two best programs in Macon County clashing, each team with a distinct style and coaching personality.
Maroa coach Josh Jostes can pinpoint the exact moment it became a rivalry -- Oct. 30, 2004, when the Trojans football team that had been ho-hum for close to a decade knocked off the mighty Bulldogs in the second round of the Class 2A playoffs. It came two months after getting soundly beaten by eventual Okaw Valley Conference champion St. Teresa in the regular season.
Starting with that game, Maroa is on the short list of best programs in the state, advancing to five state championship games and two state titles.
St. Teresa doesn't have that kind of postseason resume, but the Bulldogs do have bragging rights -- the Bulldogs have won four of the last five in the series.
But after Friday night's game between the two rivals at St. Teresa, it's over. Maroa is moving to the 10-team Sangamo Conference next year, which means the Trojans will no longer have non-conference games. And with Maroa set solidly in Class 2A and St. Teresa in 1A this year and likely returning to 3A next year, it could be a long time before the teams play again, if they ever do.
"I'm sad to see it go -- it's sickening, actually," Jostes said. "It's always been fun to play somebody you know you're going to get their best effort from -- a playoff-type atmosphere before you even get to the playoffs. You can't ask for more than that.
"Thinking back, I can remember every one of our games against them. I could go through them all."
Brilley grew up in Forsyth, so he knew some of the players on Maroa's team during his playing days. But at that time, Central A&M was the Bulldogs' big rival.
"From a football standpoint, the rivarly hadn't been established," Brilley said. "It was more of a basketball rivalry, really. I mean, they're right up the road and I knew a lot of those guys, but it wasn't at the level it later got to, by any means."
Jostes' first five games coaching against St. Teresa weren't good -- Maroa lost all five regular season games from 2000-04, though two of them were close. The 2004 regular season game between the teams was business as usual -- Maroa fell to 0-2, allowing 203 yards rushing and allowing a surprising 167 yards and two touchdowns through the air to the Bulldogs.
But Maroa, which hadn't been to the playoffs since 1999, won nine of its next 10 games in 2004, including the improbable first-round road playoff win in which 6-3 Maroa out-rushed 9-0 St. Teresa 190-118.
"We shocked a lot of people -- them included," Jostes said. "That got us on this roll that we've been fortunate enough to be on now for 12 years. That got it all started. We got our confidence in that game."
The next year, the rivalry burned at its hottest. Maroa blew out St. Teresa in the regular season to break the Bulldogs' 28-game regular season winning streak. But St. Teresa got payback in the second round of the playoffs.
It's a loss that still haunts Jostes.
"Yeah, that's a bitter memory -- I'm still bitter," Jostes said. "We had the ball at their 25-yard-line with a third-and-4 up by 6 and we snapped the ball over Luke (Hockaday's) head for a 25-yard-loss.
"We ended up having to punt and Sean Dunning went 80 yards and beat us. It was a great game. A lot of people thought since we beat them in the regular season we took them lightly, but that wasn't it. We showed up, they had just gotten better."
The next year, the IHSA imposed a multiplier that pushed St. Teresa up a class and the teams haven't met in the postseason since. Then in 2007 the Okaw added Tolono Unity and Tuscola, which sent St. Teresa to the Okaw Black and Maroa to the Okaw Blue.
Still, the teams were good, the towns were close and the personalities of the two head coaches clashed -- Jostes' brash, modern, up-tempo style vs. then-St. Teresa coach Scott Davis' conservative, old-school, power run game.
"All through my childhood, I would go to games on Friday nights and that was a game I'd always go to no matter what, home or away," St. Teresa senior Ethan Lehman said. "You had the different ideologies of the coaches and the way the teams played -- Maroa playing a spread and St. Teresa with the great history of an amazing running game.
"It was the perfect rivalry."
The game meant a lot to everyone -- players, coaches, fans and media. There was always a lot of hype leading into the games, which led to pressure. In the games between 2007-10, it showed -- all four low-scoring and sloppy.
"The 2010 game, Logan (Stelzriede) just had a bad game," Jostes said. "He was overthrowing receivers -- he overthrew Joe Hockaday on what should have been a 70-yard touchdown. Logan had a great career, but the nerves got to him in that one."
In 2011, the regular rotation of the Okaw schedule took Maroa and St. Teresa off each other's schedules for two seasons. That year, Davis left St. Teresa for Mount Zion and Brilley became coach. The Bulldogs struggled through a 2-7 season while Maroa won a state title in 2012.
By the time the teams met again in 2013, it didn't feel the same. Maroa blew out the Bulldogs in the final game between the teams while they were still in the Okaw.
That was the year Brandon Owens-Price began playing football for the Trojans. Owens-Price grew up in the St. Louis area, so he hadn't seen the peak of the rivalry first hand.
"I heard plenty about it, I've seen the emotion my teammates put into it, and I've played in the game, so I know it's a big deal and I get pumped, too," Owens-Price said. "But I don't have a football background and I didn't play those guys in JFL like my teammates did. And I don't know all the old players.
"From what I've seen, Tolono Unity is our rival. That's the one I get excited for."
After high school, Brilley was off to college at McKendree and later coached at Breese Central. He kept up with St. Teresa football through friends, family and conversations with Davis, but -- like Owens-Price -- didn't experience the rivalries' hottest years first hand.
"I kept in touch with coach Davis, but the conversation never turned to the Maroa rivalry -- I heard more about that from my younger sisters, who were here at the start of it," Brilley said. "Some of my assistants, Nick Blackburn and Andrew Schaab, they lived through it, so I know how important it is. And I have great respect for Maroa's program. It's good for us to play competition of that level."
After the Okaw breakup, which ended with St. Teresa joining the Central Illinois Conference, the two schools agreed to continue the rivalry as a non-conference game. Last year, a St. Teresa team with several sophomores as part of its starting lineup shocked the Jack Hockaday-led Trojans, with the Bulldogs' Patrick Althoff intercepting Hockaday three times and also throwing two trick-play touchdowns.
"I have a bitter taste from that one," Maroa senior Chad Howell said. "I really want to come out and beat them this year."
Whatever the final result, it's one last chance for everyone to experience a great rivalry. Howell said he plans to cherish it.
"There's a history to it and I'm just glad to be a part of it -- it's the game you look forward to most ever year," Howell said. "It will always be a rivalry to me -- even after I graduate I want to be able to come back and watch Maroa and St. T, so this is sad to me."
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