Schools

Spiraling toward rivalry

Wesley Chapel's two high schools face off as football foes.

By MICHAEL KRUSE, Times Staff Writer
Published September 2, 2007

With the setting sun as a backdrop, new cross-town rivals Wiregrass Ranch and Wesley Chapel High faced off for the first time Friday. It was the first regular-season game for Wiregrass Ranch, which is in its second year of existence.
	[Times photo: Stephen J. Coddington]

ADVERTISEMENT [Times photo: Stephen J. Coddington] Wiregrass Ranch sophomore Taelor Brown, 15, wears and waves his support for the Bulls as they kick off their football season. [Times photo: Stephen J. Coddington] The Wiregrass Ranch High School football team charges onto the playing field before the start of the team's season-opener at Wesley Chapel High.

WESLEY CHAPEL - The kickoff at Friday night's Wiregrass Ranch-Wesley Chapel football game was not just any old kickoff.

It started the first game of the season for both teams.

It started the first ever season of varsity football for Wiregrass.

It started what could be, should be, almost certainly will be, a hot cross-community rivalry in the years to come.

And it also was a unique sort of milepost in the ongoing transformation of fast-growing central Pasco County from a rural Old Florida outpost to a busy new Tampa Bay suburb. The only thing more remarkable than the scope of the growth has been the pace of the change.

Up until eight years ago, Wesley Chapel had no high school. Now it has two, and they're playing each other in varsity football.

"It's awesome, isn't it?" honorary Wesley Chapel Mayor Martine Duncan said. "I don't know what to say except wow. Wow for Wesley Chapel."

"It boggles the mind," said Michael Boyette, 53, who's a local historian. He's fifth-generation Wesley Chapel and lives on the land his kin settled in 1843.

"It's astonishing," he said.

For people who have lived here just one year, or three years or five years - that is, the vast majority of the people who live here - it's hard to picture this place being basically quiet cypress swamp, palmetto scrub and so much wide-open pasture land. But it's true. For most of the last century and a half, people in these parts fished for brim, hunted for rabbit, squirrel and quail, and made livings with citrus, cattle and moonshine.

That was the way it was, and for a very, very long time.

Not long ago, Boyette went out to his family's plot at the old Holton Cemetery up on McKendree Road, where the names on the stones make for an area history lesson.

"I was thinking," he said, "about what my grandfather would think if he were alive today."

In the '50s and '60s, he said, people used to bring their souped-up Chevys and their greased-back hair and drag race on what was then the 30th Street extension and what is now Bruce B. Downs Boulevard and what often has been mocked as "the road to nowhere."

Back then, though, "the road to nowhere" stopped at the county line. Then it finally did come into Pasco and up to State Road 54. Now, of course, "nowhere" is a traffic nightmare.

Laci Boyette is Michael Boyette's younger cousin.

"Fifty-four wasn't always so slam-packed," she said. "My dad said that when he was growing up you could stand out there on 54 and have a picnic."

Her great-great-great-great-grandfather founded the First Baptist Church of Wesley Chapel in 1878.

Her dad used to hunt where the JCPenney and the Office Depot are now.

Her brother, Brooks, who's only 26, was born before Wesley Chapel had its first grocery store.

And Laci Boyette was the first in the long line of the Boyettes of Wesley Chapel to actually go to Wesley Chapel High School. Everyone else went to Pasco High or Land O'Lakes High or Zephyrhills High. She's Wesley Chapel Class of 2004, 21 years old by now, and the high school was built when she was in the eighth grade.

But once everything started changing, it really started changing, and it hasn't stopped, with a Super Target here and a Rooms To Go there, and with the three sprawling malls on the way with major national big-box chains like a Barnes & Noble and a Best Buy and a Banana Republic and 34 megaplex movie screens.

There are many ways to mark this shift.

And now this:

Two high schools.

From Wesley Chapel.

Playing each other, on Friday night, under the lights.

"It's just a natural rivalry that's going to grow each year," said Ray Bonti, the principal at Wiregrass.

"A lot of these kids know one another," Wiregrass history teacher Connie Hines said.

"Some of their kids were playing for us a couple years ago," Wesley Chapel athletic director Steve Mumaw said.

There's more. Wiregrass coach Ricky Thomas used to coach at Weightman Middle School. That's the feeder school for Wesley Chapel High.

In spring 2006, before Wiregrass had even opened, Wesley Chapel coach John Castelamare sent Thomas six new footballs, some water coolers and two boxes of plastic cups so he could have some version of spring football for his brand new program.

"Any time you know your opponents, and maybe used to play on the same team, you know that's a good rivalry," said Michelle Bailey, who along with her husband, Gary, runs the Beef O'Brady's on 54.

It's not even just the players and the coaches.

Before the game Friday evening, a boy cheerleader from Wiregrass ran to hug, one by one, a whole gaggle of girl cheerleaders from Wesley Chapel.

"I miss all you guys," junior Reinaldo Cotto told them.

A Wesley Chapel science teacher called Wiregrass sophomore cheerleader and former Wesley Chapel student Taylor McKelvey a "traitor." He was kidding. Probably.

"We're excited for this game," said Karalyn Eilrich, another Wiregrass cheerleader who used to go to Wesley Chapel.

"I'm just happy I got to see all my old friends," Cotto said.

"But by the time we graduate," he added," it's going to be, like ..."

He smacked his hands together.

A rivalry?

"Yeah," he said. "This is pretty much our big game of the season."

The PA man said just before kickoff that this game was just the first of "what is sure to be a great rivalry."

A rivalry, of course, can take a number of forms, but it absolutely must have at least two things - 1 familiarity and (2) time.

And it can't just be created.

It can't be fake.

You know one when you see one. The best rivalries are authentically, organically, self-evidently important. Or they're not.

But everything has to start somewhere.

Alabama and Auburn played football for the first time on Feb. 22, 1892.

The franchises that are now known as the Red Sox and the Yankees played baseball for the first time on April 26, 1901.

Duke and North Carolina played basketball for the first time on Jan. 24, 1920.

And let the record show: On Aug. 31, 2007, at 7:36 p.m. and under a light but steady rain, Wesley Chapel's Juan Salguero kicked off to Wiregrass Ranch's Tony Standifer, and Standifer caught the ball, and he and his teammates came surging forward.

Let the record also show, by the way, that Wesley Chapel beat Wiregrass 28-12, and that after the beating the Wesley Chapel marching band circled around the Wiregrass players as they were walking off the field, and that some of the members of the band - the band! - started dancing and taunting their visitors, and that Wiregrass coach Ricky Thomas looked pretty much the opposite of pleased.

Is this a rivalry yet?

"It will be," Castelamare said.

Times staff photojournalist Stephen J. Coddington contributed to this report. Michael Kruse can be reached at mkruse@sptimes.com or (813) 909-4607.

[Last modified September 1, 2007, 20:54:34]