A City Divided
The city of Chandler grew exponentially towards the end of the 20th century, spawning the need for a new high school.
For more than 80 years, just one public high school facilitated the needs of the city of Chandler.
The town, which was fueled by the cotton and agricultural industry, sat at nearly 80 square miles, funneling all of their kids to the historic Chandler High School.
For years, it worked. The inaugural graduating class at Chandler High boasted three graduates — two boys and one girl, as the school still boasts at its annual graduations to this day — and by the time the school won its first state championship in football the overall population of the city sat at about 3,800 residents. Now, Chandler High alone has nearly the same population.
According to the US census, by 1998 the population in Chandler sat at about 160,105. It was at that time that Chandler High School, then 84 years old, was beginning to show its age and that fall a second high school, Hamilton, opened its doors.
There were now just too many kids to serve, the Chandler Unified School District decided.
“Up until 1998, there was only one high school in the Chandler Unified School District and that was Chandler High and it served 80 square miles, believe it or not,” district public relations director Terry Locke said. “It was just grades 10–12 back then because they didn’t have the room to have ninth graders. Those kids stayed in the junior high schools until 1998. But if you lived out at Power and Riggs Road out where Litchfield High School is now, Chandler High School was your school. You would get on a bus or have your parents drive you really the length of the district boundaries pretty much. That was all we needed for all those years, and then we started to have a kind of growth as home development continued, primarily in south Chandler. We opened up Hamilton in 1998, starting off with Chandler High School having 12 square miles and Hamilton having 68 square miles because a lot of that area was still undeveloped.
“It was very difficult. You had so much tradition and so much history at the school. We had a number of parents who really wanted their kids to have the same kind of education they had at Chandler High School. On the flip side, you had people that lived in south Chandler and wanted to go to a new school. They’d think that maybe it was going to be better without knowing. Hamilton’s been fantastic from the start academically, athletically, so it’s a tough one. The difference with high school boundaries and decisions, unlike elementary or junior high, is that at the high school level that’s going to be your alma mater. That’s your final place, so it’s a little more controversial and emotional and difficult for families and staff as well.”
For some, the new school split the city apart.
“The city was sort of bursting at the seams,” Ralph Amdsen, who was a student at the time and has since become a local high school sports reporter. “It really needed Hamilton to be built. At the time, ninth graders went to junior high, so it was seventh, eighth and ninth graders at the junior high level. There were only three junior highs — Willis, Anderson and Bogle, and even though I lived in north Chandler I had to be bussed all the way to south Chandler to go to Bogle Junior High School. Bogle Junior High School is right next to Hamilton, so when that opened I was going to be auctioned to go to one school or the other.
“I ended up at Chandler, and maybe four kids from my entire junior high actually decided to go to Chandler and didn’t feed into Hamilton to become that first four-year graduating class. I ended up not being around a lot of my friends and I think it was the same way for a lot of other people. That was also at a point where they actually moved the freshman level from the junior highs into the high schools. All of a sudden, you had ninth grade at Chandler High when you hadn’t for a while, you had ninth grade at Hamilton and probably about 30 percent of the population at Chandler High in 10th through 12th grade left for Hamilton. There were a few seniors that first year at Hamilton, but as far as 10th and 11th graders a lot of them actually left. It was a pretty big divide, and then you had people who left after a semester or after a year just because Hamilton was so nice and so brand-new.”
Others thought it was coming far too late.
“Chandler High was Chandler,” former Chandler athletic director Dave Shapiro said. “It was 80 square miles. When I first started working at Chandler, the joke was that they’re going to build a high school in five years. It took about 20 years before they finally built it, but there really is a huge tradition… When I first started at Chandler, there was 25,000 people. There was nothing here but alfalfa, dairy and cotton.”
The massive growth in the city was fueled by the vast amount of space that once serviced students of Chandler High, suddenly turning a rural town to one of the most heavily-populated Phoenix-area suburbs.
“I remember back when I was teaching driver’s [education] we’d have to go to Tempe over by ASU so our kids could see what it was like to drive with traffic,” Shapiro said. “Now we can’t even get the heck out of the parking lot, the traffic’s so backed up. It’s basically massive growth. In 1982, only 25,000 people lived in Chandler. Then you have a city council who is pretty visionary with the whole Price Corridor and the high tech, re-doing downtown Chandler so it doesn’t decay. I think the city government and the school district have partnered up and they have their vision, they have their plan and it’s working really well.”
With the new school popping up, there were natural tensions, But not all of these divides were related to just losing friendships.
“Hamilton was brand-new, and Chandler was not,” Amsden said. “Chandler was 85 years old. The city of Chandler has always been mixed demographically and one of the interesting things about a lot of the new builds were the cotton fields and the corn fields were being sold off to developers for building these new homes. A lot of the people who were moving into those neighborhoods were overwhelmingly Caucasian and were middle class to upper middle class. When you have north Chandler, which didn’t exactly have a majority populous.
“In my elementary school you had 30 kids in a class and it would be hard to find four or five of the same background in anything. When you get a little more homogenous based on community growth, you have those stereotypes where you call Hamilton a rich school and they would call Chandler a poor school. Some statistics would back that up, like free and reduced lunch rates and some economic factors. You had that separation, and then you also had Willis and Anderson who had a larger Hispanic population and they would filter mostly into Chandler High School. You had a racial divide built in, but there really wasn’t a ton of animosity there. It would sort of be used as a secondary thing when it came to sports and you had student sections that are looking to make fun of other student sections. That’s the type of thing that they would look to twist the knife or needle. There was quite a bit of that. If you talked to anybody associated with the rivalry early on, there was probably a chance that when the game would be played at Hamilton that Chandler people would show up and hear chants about things that have to do with landscaping and other racial epithets and stereotypes. You’d have Hamilton kids come to Chandler and you’d have chants of ‘Daddy’s money’ or whatever else. I think that those were for the most part secondary. The rivalry was going to be a good rivalry either way, but it just sort of worked out where there was racial and socioeconomic divides that were in place when Hamilton opened up.”
Added former Hamilton linebacker Jimmy Rogers: “When Hamilton was being built, there really weren’t a whole lot of communities being built out there as far as housing developments and stuff. It’s changed a lot, but the community itself as far as the Hamilton-Chandler rivalry. I think there were people who weren’t really associated with Hamilton High School or Hamilton football that were in the Chandler boundaries that were maybe jealous or, I’m not sure the right word, but they kind of had some spite towards Hamilton and those who went to Hamilton. Hamilton was seen as kind of the rich kid type of deal, while Chandler was seen as like the blue-collar program that was older and had tradition but there’s a lot of us that went to Hamilton that didn’t come from a rich family or anything like that.”
There, of course, was also ill will towards those who chose the brand-new school over the one of tradition and history, as many did. Several people, even those who had siblings or parents who had graduated from Chandler, spurned the school in favor of attending Hamilton. One of these was Rogers, who had two brothers go through Chandler before using athletics as a reason to choose Hamilton over Chandler.
“One of the reasons I wound up going to Hamilton is because I grew up playing baseball, and all the kids I grew up playing on All-Star teams with were planning on going to Hamilton to play since it was in the area that they lived in,” Rogers said. “Both of my brothers went to Chandler High School, so I was actually in the school district to go to Chandler. I got a boundary exemption to go to Hamilton. They were having good progress in football, so that’s why I decided to go there.
“I went to Anderson Junior High School, so all the friends that I was associated with were going to Chandler and they didn’t really know I was going to Hamilton until the last second, because I really didn’t know either. There were some hurt feelings that I was going to the rival school, but, you know, it ended up working out.”
With a new school in town, Chandler finally had something it hadn’t ever really had — a natural rivalry to push it academically and athletically.
