Early Rivalry
Hamilton was new, but it didn’t take long for them to show who dominated Arizona Avenue.
With just 3.8 miles dividing two high school football programs in the same division, there’s no questioning why Chandler and Hamilton High School have a heated rivalry.
That’s before you throw in the actual history to the rivalry.
Of course, the first iterations of the Battle for Arizona Avenue had nothing to do with football. With Hamilton playing down a few divisions to ease into varsity play with no seniors, Chandler instead had to focus on something else — making sure their base of students and talent didn’t leave down the road to the shiny, new campus.
“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,” Ralph Amsden, now a high school football reporter covering Arizona, said of his experience growing up during the opening. “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.”
For the entire time Chandler had been a city, its students had gone to Chandler High School. All of a sudden, a city that was growing exponentially needed a new school and instantly divided the population.
“You can imagine the animosity from a school that was like 85 years old and the only school in town,” Amsden said. “To have its population taken away by a brand-new school in south Chandler with a lot of people living in those neighborhoods who had moved here from somewhere else. There was a lot of tension at that time.”
After Hamilton posted a promising first season against inferior competition, they received a major upgrade. Terrell Suggs, who had been working at fullback for a dwindling Chandler program, announced his intention to transfer to Hamilton, where he ballooned into the state Player of the Year as a senior.
“[Suggs] was probably the biggest name out there in high school football at the time in Arizona,” Arizona Republic high school sports writer Richard Obert said. “He basically put Hamilton on the map. I believe he had transferred from Chandler and had gone over there because it was a new school and that’s all they needed. He was a big, star player and the rest is history.”
With a rivalry two years in the making, it just added on to the impact of the first-ever matchup between the two schools. The upstarts stunned Chandler, 27–0, landing the first blow in the rivalry.
“There was a two-year wait for Chandler to be able to play them, so the anticipation that was built into that first game set it up to be a great rivalry from the get-go,” Amsden said. “It was probably always that way, and then when Chandler just got smacked that’s just when they started a 364-day countdown for until they get a chance to redeem themselves. It didn’t matter how many times they lost or if we’re just talking about football, I think because Hamilton didn’t have seniors and had to wait two years and a lot of those people started out at the same school, it was special immediately.
“I think the first couple really set the tone because it wasn’t like a miraculous victory from a new school over an established school like Friday Night Lights and East Dillon and West Dillon. It was a brand-new school coming in and taking the establishment and putting its foot on their throat and I think Chandler was just intimidated from that point on.”
The win required some trickery, with Hamilton head coach John Wrenn flexing his playbook and winning the game on special teams.
“We ran a fake punt to win our first year,” Wrenn said. “We were backed up and it was like fourth and 30 and we ran a fake punt for a long yardage gain and we did some crazy things because the pressure was on them, it wasn’t on us. That really helps.”
The win set the tone for the rivalry, sparking a remarkable winning streak against the Wolves.
“You know, the first time we ever played Chandler, it was — Chandler had always had talent, there’s no doubt about that — be just felt like, hey, I think that our schemes are really good,” offensive coordinator Deke Schutes said. “I believe our kids believe now that they had been through a year, they had got Terrell Suggs and so I thought it was a toss-up but I think we can win this game…That first year when we played Chandler, Chandler was kind of coming off a season in which it hadn’t won many games even though they had the talent. We had won seven games, and then the next year we were I don’t know, 8–1 or 9–1 when we went to play them.
“I believe our kids thought, ‘Hey, we could beat this team.’ I believe with having Terrell, Terrell kind of wanted to prove something because he had come from Chandler and they didn’t think — I don’t know if they didn’t think he was a good running back, but he wasn’t their starting tailback — so he felt like he wanted to show those guys he should have been the starting tailback. That first game, he just really dominated that night and we were lucky to get out of there with a win. Once we won that game, I believe that gave us a lot of credibility that anybody that comes to Chandler, they want to go to Hamilton now.”
Chandler would fold the final season, capping off a 0–10 season with a 41–3 loss to Hamilton. Even after promising starts to the 2001 and 2002 seasons, the Wolves fell, 17–7 and 17–0.
Even then, Wrenn felt lucky at times to skate by with wins.
“They were good!” Wrenn recalled. “They were good, and they were well-taught, we just worked hard that time and we were lucky enough to win. But they were a good football team at that point in time.”
The early Hamilton dominance over Chandler sparked a secondary movement of student-athletes between the schools.
“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,” former Hamilton linebacker Jimmy 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.”
Rogers had great success in his time with the Huskies, claiming two state titles and three conference championships while the Chandler program was looking to regain its foothold.
“Everyone jumped ship and everyone was like, ‘[Hamilton is] cheating. They’re cheaters, stealing our kids,’” former Chandler athletic director Dave Shapiro said. “After a while, I grew tired of hearing that. I asked, ‘Why are athletes leaving our program?’ In the meantime, we had also hired Jim Ewan after Bob Ford and five years of languishing towards the bottom of the heap. Hiring Jim [Ewan] was a big help in [turning it around], because he instituted programs that we wanted to see where there was a total buy-in from staff, athletes and the community as well.”
With the level of success at Hamilton, in all phases, Chandler needed to just compete, let alone win.
“There just wasn’t a lot of team success back then, and when Hamilton sort of brought in everything to model team success by winning its first football title in 2003,” Amsden said. “I think they won a baseball title in 2003. When they started doing those things, I think Chandler realized that it was possible.
“I think it was confusing. There was some introspection there of ‘What are we doing wrong?’ and not a lot of people like to admit that anything is wrong, so instead of looking at what can be changed and what could be done different I think there was a lot of blame. [They’d say] they took our athletes and we were poised to do that well. They took our athletes and gerrymandered the boundary. Some of those things might actually be true, but at the time the reason the people were saying that was because they were embarrassed that a brand-new school had showed up and had that type of success that quickly. A lot of the people who were coaching at Hamilton were people who were teaching at the junior high level and moved up to Hamilton and maybe were coaching for the very first time or were really early in their coaching careers. I know for a fact that the tennis coaches, the men’s basketball coaches, the offensive coordinator at Hamilton football, a lot of them were coming from junior high. They had experienced coaching at some level, but it wasn’t like Chandler and going out and hiring people who had worked at different schools or anything like that. Jarring is definitely a good way to put it, and then there was some finger pointing and some blame to go around before I think Chandler finally just realized that they had to adapt and try to figure it out on their own.”
The hire of Jim Ewan did little to make a change on the scoreboard at first, with his teams combining for just seven points in the first four rivalry matchups of his tenure from 2001–04. Despite the lack of on-field success, Ewan set out to approach the rivalry with a new sense of focus and attention.
“I tried to put everything we could into it,” Ewan said. “I thought that and the first few years it was the last game of the season, and I thought that’s the way it should be. For a city championship and seeding going into the playoffs, I loved that. Back then, it was just the two high schools and we made a big thing out of it. I thought it was important, and I liked the excitement that came with it. When those games were being played, whether it was at Chandler or at Hamilton, it was usually on TV and usually in front of about 10,000 people. At the high school level, it was always an exciting night. I thought it was important, so I definitely tried to emphasize it and make a big thing out of it.”
Even as the talent level began to match up, the wins kept piling up for the Huskies. Even with Steve Belles taking over for John Wrenn as Hamilton’s head coach, the dominance continued. It took until 2008 — the 10th anniversary of Hamilton opening its doors for the first time, for Chandler to put together a close battle in a 41–26 loss. They fell again, 14–0, in the playoffs that season before one of the most devastating losses in Chandler High School football history.
Leading 20–10 late, it appeared that just about everything had aligned for the first-ever Chandler victory over Hamilton. They scored the put away touchdown, only to find laundry on the turf to call it back. After scoring a quick touchdown, the Huskies got the ball again before finding wide receiver Kyren Poe in the back of the end zone for the game-winning score.
“That was a gut-wrenching one,” Ewan said of the loss.
“It was crazy,” Belles said. “Those kids really believed that we were going to win. We just didn’t have much offense going. It seemed like every time we’d have something, it would sputter and the next thing you know the fourth quarter comes and it’s like, ‘OK, let’s figure this out’ and they did. We found a way to win.”
It continued the Chandler narrative, one of close-misses and a lack of execution, year after year.
“Chandler was always a program that everybody said couldn’t get over the hump,” Arizona Republic high school sports columnist Scott Bordow said. “Even when they had these great athletes like Brett Hundley they just couldn’t win the big game. It was, for certain, a really good program, but a program that just couldn’t come up big at the biggest time.”
The loss continued to play into Chandler’s psyche, Amsden said.
“When Chandler started to get close in a couple of those games, and then they had heartbreaking losses instead of getting blown out, those were tougher to swallow than the blowouts. I think that there were some affiliated with the program who were either stubborn or stupid enough to say, ‘We’re going to get them.’
“These athletes are young, and a lot of them played together in Pop Warner and stuff like that and they don’t go into any of these games thinking that they’re going to lose. I don’t know how much there is to the whole psychology of being beaten before the game even starts. I think that these kids went out and did what they were supposed to and talent won out in nearly every circumstance. When it did start to get closer and closer I think some people got more confident and I think some people probably thought about it more like a Chicago Cubs, we’re cursed-type thing. Sometimes a blowout is easier to swallow than a last-second field goal or a touchdown with no time left.”
The Wolves fell again that year in the playoffs, losing 49–21 to Hamilton when Zach Bauman and Michael Allen each ran for 200 yards.
After another loss in 2010, Ewan decided it was time to step away.
“There needed to be a change, just something,” he said. “Obviously, we were close to knocking on the door but I couldn’t quite get us where we needed to be so I just thought it was time to walk away from it.”
The Huskies blew Chandler out the following season, 38–20, before losing 28–21 in 2011 on Cole Luke’s fumble recovery touchdown.
“I just remember us thinking, ‘Holy sh — , we’re about the be that team that lost to Chandler,’ and a lot of us were just thinking there was no chance,” Luke said. “We can’t be that team, because just like I said before, [we would be humiliated]. I remember I had a fumble recovery and scored, which was unbelievable. That was like the greatest moment of my life back there and is still so crazy. I still, to this very day, still don’t believe it. I watch it every now and then.
Even as Belles defeated new Chandler coach Shaun Aguano in his first two seasons as head coach to bring Hamilton’s record to 17–0 against the Wolves, the streak refused to be nothing more than a communal phenomenon.
“We didn’t talk about it too much,” Belles said. “It’s that game at that time. It was a big deal, I think, to the community more than it was to the players playing. They just knew we had Chandler this week and let’s get after them.”
