DE PERE (NBC 26) — Athletic rivalries between the west and east sides of De Pere date back more than a century.
The rivalry continues Friday night in the trans-Fox River community — which city officials and historians said is the only city in the state with two different school districts.
The football game Friday night at West De Pere — shown live on Sports Showdown on TV 32 and nbc26.com — is the latest in a rivalry that was once extremely contentious.
In a Nov. 23, 1915 football game, the east side club team (then called the Badgers) forfeited because of a disagreement with referee E.A. Seymour, according to the Nov. 26, 1915 issue of the De Pere Journal-Democrat.
Seymour had ejected east side's "Stub" Schumerth for for calling the referee "crooked." The east side protested the ejection, the police chief was called and crowds stormed the field. The west side won by forfeit.
After the game — more mayhem.
"There was numerous fights in the community between east side and west side rivals, their fans," De Pere Historical Society president McKim Boyd said. "During the course of the evening, there was a bridge fire [on the Claude Allouez Bridge]."
The city then decided the two sides of the river could not be civil when they played each other in sports — so it wasn't allowed, for decades.
"It was the heat, or the intensity of the rivalry, that the city fathers deemed that they should not compete in athletics," Boyd said. "And, of course, that stood for 37 years."
A challenge from the Badger club to replay the game with a 'neutral' referee never materialized, and the rivalry went silent until 1952.
By then, high school athletics became more popular, and the city was ready to reconcile its differences with a sporting event again.
They would play a basketball game at neutral St. Norbert College, to accommodate the hordes of people that wanted to attend.
The Nicolet Phantoms of the west side defeated the De Pere Redbirds in boys basketball on January 18, 1952. Later that year, the first Nicolet vs. De Pere high school football game was held. The rivalry has continued ever since, coming and going between the two high schools moving athletic conferences.
Nicolet High School later became West De Pere High — De Pere High is still De Pere, though some in town call it "east De Pere" — but through it all, the school districts remain separate. Despite multiple attempts to bring them together, the School District of West De Pere and Unified School District of De Pere do their own thing.
"There's been a minimum of 10 referendums to consolidate the two school districts," Boyd said. "As anyone from De Pere knows, none of those were successful, and we still have the two school districts."
So now, the city — which merged its halves in 1890 — is still home to two school districts, two high schools, and one iconic rivalry.
