The Tradition Begins
A rivalry is born with a simple
decision to build a new High School
My wife
and our two very young daughters and I moved to
Long time
aficionados of high school sports, Sherry and I immediately began to attend
Leander football games. We even took in the occasional basketball game, rooting
for the Lions and their feisty coach, a young(er) fellow named Mike Bridges.
Across the street from us lived one of the Lady Lions’ best basketball players
and we went to a few of those games as well.
As a
softball coach over at LCP, I even helped to groom the field for the nascent
Leander softball team, which used our facility as their home field the first
couple of years of the program. We were all glad to be of service, and truly
looked forward to our own young athletes wearing the reds and blues of Leander
some day down the line.
Along
about 1995 something life-changing happened. We should have seen it coming, in
retrospect. Prodigious growth in the
One day
we read in the Hill Country News that a goat field full of prickly pear cactus
and mesquite bushes, tucked into a crook at the west end of Cypress Creek road
where it ended in a sharp left onto Dies Ranch road, was the empty acreage LISD
bought for this new high school. It was just across the road from the Cypress
Creek Ranch, where the
Sometime
in 1996, the bulldozers started scraping that goat field. Construction began
soon thereafter. Living within a mile of the place, on weekends Sherry and I
would walk into the area and tour the partially-completed facility, probably illegally,
realizing that this would become the place our girls would make their high
school memories. I recall going into the competition gym, with the wooden slats
just recently laid down, not even anchored to the underframing yet, no lacquer,
no black lines, no bleachers or embellishments anywhere. I stood where I
thought the right corner would be on the north side
and visualized one of our team’s players nailing a three at the buzzer some day
from that very spot.
The
schedule called for the school to open in the fall of 1998. But through 1997
there were some major administrative and political hurdles to overcome. A
well-regarded principal at brand new
There was
some internal consternation of the type that cooler heads would certainly
consider misplaced, but which seemed greatly important to some at the time. For
example, the way school taxes and budgeting work, it was obvious that half of LHS’s
band equipment would need to be shipped over to the new school when it opened. So
would half the football shoulder pads, for instance. All this was looked upon
as a great wrong, almost as theft, by the good folks at Leander. They firmly
believed everything in the district that belonged in a high school belonged to
them. Much grumbling was heard over the sharing of the LISD football facility,
and even more grief emanated from Leander partisans when they learned the
stadium would have to lose its proprietary and partisan “Lion Stadium” designation,
and that the reds and blues of LHS at the venerable facility would have to be
painted over in more neutral colors.
Perhaps
the biggest sign of all that the folks in the northern part of LISD were not
taking this new high school situation very well was the fight over the name.
LHS partisans deeply and dearly wanted the new school to be called just
“Leander High School South”. When this was balked at, they offered “Lakeline
High” and something like “Catfish High” (for some obscure 19th-century
early settler of the Leander area) – basically, ANYthing
except the obvious “Cedar Park High”. Many Leanderites could not endure this
new school developing any sort of community identity with the civic entity of
Their
vehemence over this clashed with the common sense efforts of many others in
LISD who realized that the citizens and students the new school would serve
were the ones to properly decide the name.
So, in
1997, a vote was taken among the students who would feed the new school’s
opening two classes the next fall- the eighth graders at CPMS and the freshmen
at Leander High who lived south of 1431 (at least those who chose to switch
when the new school was ready- about half that class). The vote offered several
options. The poorly-conceived preferences from LHS partisans were
listed -“South High”, “Lakeline High”, and so forth. The other choice on
the ballot – and the obvious one – was the natural “
Further,
that ballot offered various options for the school mascot and school colors.
You know the results there: “Timberwolves” and “forest green and charcoal” were
the landslide winners. The alternative choices in the mascot category were all
in the cat family, which had long been a tradition in naming school mascots in
LISD at the time. The non-cat choice of “Timberwolves” further confabulated
Leander partisans.
This name
issue lives on today, in the form of the letters tacked onto the front of the
Cedar Park Performing Arts Center- “Leander Performing Arts Center South”. Worth a chuckle, how important this drive to
avoid naming
By early
1998, staff hiring was underway. A perfectly natural trend is that the top teachers
often like to move on to new school startups. This is not new: every school
district in
By the
time the Cedar Park High School opened in the fall of 1998, between CPHS “stealing”
Leander’s equipment, “bribing” its best teachers, crowding into its football
stadium, NOT toeing the politically correct line with the name and mascot
choice, heck- existing at all… old
time Leander folks just despised us.
And thus the nature of this rivalry. It’s almost exactly like a
sibling rivalry in nature, where the firstborn develops jealousy of the new
baby and the necessary attention it commands, attention formerly aimed solely
at that firstborn.
But this
rivalry had to burn relatively unfueled for a while. During CPHS’ first year
there were only a full freshman class (the seniors of 2002) and half of
Leander’s class of 2001 as our sophomores. In athletics, only soccer competed
at the varsity level that first school year, and the UIL regarded us as a non-district-affiliated
4A school. Staring with the 1999-2000 school year, the UIL placed us in
district 17-4A while Leander was still a 5A school despite having lost what
amounted to half its freshman and sophomore classes that first year of CPHS
operations. Thus, the two schools were held at arm’s length as far as UIL
competition was concerned for the first three years, while
Prior to that
jump to 5A,
The first
football season of 1998 was unofficial. No records were kept and our team of
mostly freshmen and a very few sophomores was thrown mostly against the
18-year-old seniors of smaller school varsities, with a few games against
junior varsities. Generally speaking, it was not pretty. But I do recall that
the very young team actually won three of the ten games played, but nothing was
written down from that developmental season, and I can’t even remember over
whom those wins came.
The
second season, 1999, was the first full-up varsity schedule, and included
rematches of several games in which our boys were shellacked the previous year,
plus a few larger schools and two top-notch private schools. Completely
unexpectedly, the Timberwolves, still with no seniors and only perhaps a dozen
juniors, nearly ran the table, taking an undefeated 9-0 record into the final
game in
Timberwolf
football had one of the toughest schedules around the first year it carried any
seniors – and darned few of them – in 2000. During a 3-7 season, they played
(and fell to) four teams that won their district championships; three of those
being 5A teams. All seven of their losses were to teams that reached the
playoffs. They were one play away from winning in four of the games they lost,
and suffered two double overtime road defeats.
In 2001,
the quickly growing school’s final campaign in 4A football, Cedar Park did
something no other high school team in the history of Leander ISD had ever
done- won an unbeaten, untied, outright district championship. That same
season, one week after Cedar Park clinched their title with a road slaughter of
Lampasas, Leander won a share of their first-ever district title, as well. But
it was a only share, as all T’wolf fans pointed out-
not an outright title. That trumping of the Lions in their own seeming hour of
initial triumph ladled concrete on Leander fans’ hard feelings toward CPHS. The
next year
Unfortunately,
they would get it.
2001 had
been a “culmination year” for a tremendous class of football players- the
seniors of 2002. The cupboard was nearly bare for that next season, with little
experience returning at exactly the wrong time- our first foray into 5A
football. At the same time, Leander looked to be loaded. The first football
game between our district’s two flagship programs occurred on Friday, October
4, 2002. It was a mid-season affair, not the rivalry weekend season-closer it has
become today.
The next
year’s game started out a little bit better. On
At this
point, Cedar Park had already enjoyed some much athletic success across a wide
range of sports, including a state championship in Cross Country, state
tournament teams in baseball, men’s soccer, women’s soccer (twice!), state meet
appearances by both track teams and the swimming and diving team, and in district
titles and post-season success in many other sports as well. But in the
National Sport of Texas, our hometown boys had been twice bested, and rather
handily, by the one team that really wanted to beat us the most. The aura of
our first-ever LISD unbeaten outright football title from 2001 faded quickly in
the light of Leander’s three consecutive co-championships.
And when
2004 started out with two straight large-margin losses, giving the program only
six wins in its previous twenty three games dating back to a playoff loss in
2001, gloom settled in. Leander was ranked in the state’s top ten and had
beaten almighty
Little
did we know what glory awaited our 2004 Timberwolves.
NEXT->
The Historic 2004 Crosstown Chow-down.