Ralph Amsden
Affiliation: founder, CTownRivals.
Interview date: March 24, 2016.
FA: I’m Fabian Ardaya, and joining me right now is CTownRivals.com founder Ralph Amsden. He also currently writes for ArizonaVarsity.com and contributes to ASUDevils.com on the Rivals side. Obviously, Ralph you have a connection to the city of Chandler through your website. Where did the idea come from for those who don’t already know?
RA: I think it was back in 2009 in the highest level of the state semifinals for football and Basha, Chandler and Hamilton were all involved. I just realized that of every community, it seemed to be that Chandler was having the most success. It’s where I grew up. I had just finished at Arizona State at the time, and figured that if I had the opportunity, I’d start something that was just dedicated to the city, writing about high school athletics. I didn’t actually get around to getting that idea off the ground until the summer of 2012. That’s when I set up the website, set up social media accounts and I just started writing. It just took off from there.
FA: What was the progress like, especially those first couple years? I know from seeing firsthand but some people don’t really know that the site grew in its first couple years and has since evolved.
RA: The first couple years, it was an interesting endeavor. The social media side of it and Twitter account was probably even more popular than the website was. I didn’t sign my name to any articles, so I’ve been told there was sort of a level of mystery as to who was even doing this. The truth is I wanted the attention to just be on the athletes and the sports. I wasn’t trying to hide or anything like that. It got to the point where we had about 10,000 visitors a month and I think that increased by the time that the website wound up being absorbed into ArizonaVarsity.com to about 30–40,000 a month.
FA: For some reason, the city of Chandler is blossoming. As someone who is a Chandler native, why do you think it’s become such a great hub for high school athletics?
RA: They say you have to have a conglomerate of things. You have to have people who are willing to invest in the community, so you have to have a long time element of your community. You have to have new families and new blood coming in which usually comes with new construction and there was a lot of space in Chandler for new construction and new homes to be built. I moved to Chandler in 1987 and I believe there were a little more than 30,000 people there and that’s grown by over 200,000 just in the last 25 years or so. I think when you have a population boom and then you have the north side of Chandler where people have just kind of stayed. They grew up and they stuck around. You have people that are investing in your community. You have a lot of athletes who decide that Chandler’s a great place to retire and raise families. You have a national incentive to try to invest, so that’s really nice, and I think that it’s just that number of factors. It also helps that the superintendent, Camile Casteel, is really invested in the success of athletics, so I think you see that as well. There’s a lot of continuity with the teachers and coaches. It’s not a district where you see a lot of teachers and coaches doing one year in any given position. Hamilton has had only two football coaches in its history. When you look at factors like the continuity, the population growth, people sticking around and investing in their community, I think those things all contribute to why it’s so successful.
FA: How has it changed since you were a student at Chandler High School? There was just Chandler and Hamilton had just started. In the years since, you’ve had Basha and Perry and even Casteel High School that have popped up? How has it continued to grow?
RA: Chandler is big enough now that you could really not even see part of the community or the city that you live in. If you grow up in north Chandler and go to Chandler High, you could go your entire life with having absolutely no reason to be out on Val Vista and Queen Creek or out near Perry or Basha. It’s big enough now where this is still the same city but it’s such a large community. You’d think that it’s not very connected, but with the advent and the progress of social media and things like that, all these kids know each other. They all played youth football together, so even though you’re living in the same city and live 40 minutes apart they’re still familiar with each other. It’s managed to keep the same community aspect that it had back when I was in school at Chandler, but what would be different about it was Chandler and Hamilton being only three miles apart. You were familiar with the territory around the school and the people who lived around there and neighborhoods and everything. I don’t necessarily think that’s the case anymore.
FA: What were things like, especially when you first moved to Chandler? How about when you were a student at Chandler High?
RA: Athletically, Chandler was a very similar to what it is now. They had the Cheetahs track club, which basically was kids from all over the state who would run in this track club and then they would just go to Chandler High because then you could run with that club and then run track at Chandler afterwards. You always had really great athletes there, and then you always had great community investment in Chandler. My freshman year at Chandler was the first year Hamilton High School was open, so you always had great community investment over there and a little bit of a wealthier neighborhood. It’s definitely not that much different. I would say that certain things contributed to Chandler being successful in sports that they didn’t use to be that successful in. Football bringing in the spread offense has allowed a lot of those track athletes at Chandler to get out and to use their speed and led Chandler to win a state championship. From 1998 to 2005, Chandler only played for the football playoffs once. The makeup of the school is very much the same. There’s been some development in the neighborhood and they’ve leveled something like 200 low-income houses and in its place is a practice field, so they’ve invested a little more in athletics as a city. You’ve seen crime rates around the school go down just as far as things like petty theft and people getting their cars broken into. I think there’s a feeling that it’s a little bit safer of an environment than it used to be, but even back 15 years ago it was still a really, really great community and a really great place to go to school and had great athletes. 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. I think they won a baseball title in 2003. When they started doing those things, I think Chandler realized that it was possible.
FA: You were a freshman at Chandler when Hamilton first opened. What was that split like? I know you must have seen at least a decent amount of your classmates have to go to this new school instead of going to Chandler like everyone had done since basically the city was created.
RA: The city was sort of bursting at the seams. 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.
FA: Do you think there was any animosity between the two schools early on, even before they played a football game?
RA: Absolutely. Any time you see a community get divided (it happens). You see that with people you talk to now if you bring up Perry around people who went to Basha when Perry opened. They say that Perry is a carbon copy of Basha. It existed only to help the population boom and rob them of half their students. There’s a bitterness between Basha and Perry even, so you can imagine the animosity from a school that was like 85 years old and the only school in town. 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.
FA: For Hamilton to have the success it had early on while Chandler was struggling with its athletic programs, how jarring was that, just to see them have that instant success?
RA: 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.
FA: How did the first couple football games set the tone for how the rivalry would unfold?
RA: The first one was a blowout, if I remember correctly. That’s just kind of how it went. I think for the first 13 or 14 years, the average score of one of those games would be 35–10 Hamilton and there’s a lot of people affiliated with Hamilton that would tell you that game was over before it ever started. Chandler didn’t even possess the belief that they had the ability to win that game. 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.
FA: Did it have that feeling early that the rivalry could be something special down the line? Or did it just seem like Chandler was always out of their element?
RA: 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.
FA: When do you think the rivalry started to become special and had a different feeling than most?
RA: A lot of people say that when ESPN endorsed it, but I think that feeling was always there. It was always there for the people who went there because the first year, Hamilton had no seniors so Chandler couldn’t play them. 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. 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.
FA: What do you think started to shift the tide, especially for Chandler trying to at least make those games a lot closer?
RA: The spread offense played a really, really big role in helping Chandler use the tools that they have at their disposal. I think that when they made a coaching change the continuity of having Shaun Aguano work there and also take over as head coach and him bringing a staff that included people who had won before like from Saguaro and other places. I think that probably helped. You also had people and a lot of the staff who were longtime Chandler people. You had Tom Bambauer, the punter on the football team that I played on, and he’s coaching special teams. You just have people who just kind of stick around and are invested in the community. Having the right offense for the kids who play there made more kids want to come out and grows the program, and then you have these youth teams and a lot of them have talented players. You look at how these offenses are ran (in high school) and you see that one school has five receivers on the field, your kid is a receiver and he’s talented, you look at the options that are available to you and you say you’re going to put them in the best place to help them succeed. Chandler is also helped out by the city of Gilbert. Gilbert Public Schools is a poorly run district, which I think may be something that 95 percent of the people affiliated with the city of Gilbert will admit. What you saw was that a lot of the kids that were supposed to go to Mesquite and were supposed to go to Campo Verde and were supposed to Gilbert High School all chose Chandler because Chandler had IB-based courses, it had a great academic reputation and the athletics were getting better. At any given time, maybe 10 percent of Chandler High School’s population probably should have been going to school, if you didn’t have open boundaries, should have been going to school in the city of Gilbert but people didn’t want to be a part of that district. People wanted to be a part of what Chandler had to offer. If you have an influx of new kids and then you’re using the athletes the right way, I think that’s when the tide really started to shift.
FA: You mentioned the population of the students of each school. How big of a role did economic status or race play a role in the rivalry between the two schools and the stereotypes that were being discussed?
RA: Hamilton was brand-new, and Chandler was not. 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.
FA: How did Chandler breaking through with a win change things? Has it changed?
RA: I think that what Hamilton said about the whole rivalry — and it was a brilliant play on their part — was that it’s not a rivalry. Somebody has to win for it to be a rivalry. That would just twist the knife for Chandler. Of course people from Hamilton wanted to keep the streak alive and they absolutely believed it was a rivalry, but they were the big little brother. For them to say that they weren’t even on their level and not ‘our rival,’ that was just the absolute best for them. They loved having the ability to do that. Now it’s an actual rivalry, and you can see Hamilton kids and parents and people from the community who show up to the games and they’re hoping to win, not expecting to win. I think that adds an element to it that was never really there before. Some people say that it’s more fun now, and others would say that it’s less fun because there’s no streak going on and some people like dynasties and they like dominance. I think on the whole it’s changed things for the better because you go into it expecting it to be a contest.
FA: Do you think there was something hanging over Chandler to finally try to get over that hump for the first time? Or was it just an inability to put together the whole package?
RA: Some people say that there was. When you lose that much, you have to associate it with something and the people kind of bring up the whole Terrell Suggs transferring thing and there are people who will call it the ‘Curse of Terrell Suggs.’ I think I’ve even fostered into that a little bit just with writing about it, but I think ultimately what it came down to was Hamilton had more kids who were better prepared, in better football shape and I don’t think it was a curse of anything like that. I just think it was like if you’d imagine starting a chess game with all your pieces in the wrong spots. I think that’s where Chandler was. They had to get their ducks in a row. They had to get their pieces in place before they could even make it a competition. It wasn’t really a cloud as much as it was –incompetence sounds bad — but it was just a matter of time, really.
FA: What stage do you see this rivalry at right now?
RA: Because people have confidently called it the best rivalry in the state, and I think that because it was featured on MaxPreps as a top-25 game a few times, because it was on ESPN, you have kids who are eight, nine, 10 years old who are hearing their older brothers and their parents talk about Chandler-Hamilton being the best rivalry in the state. That type of branding for the game, that gets in kids heads regardless of whether or not it is the best rivalry, and there are some really good ones out there that I’ve been to recently. I’d put Higley vs. Williams Field up there too, which is another thing where they built a school and half the students left. With the branding that’s there, with people just talking about it being the best rivalry, I don’t think that’s going away. Even if Chandler wins 10 in a row or Hamilton wins 10 in a row and none of them are ever close, because of the way that people talk about it and the way they’re going to assume that this is the best rivalry out there and this is the best game available.
FA: Do you think a part of why it’s considered as highly as it is now is because, for the most part of these last few years, Chandler and Hamilton have been the premier programs in the state?
RA: Success helps. You have the best team, and you have the team that they like to beat the most. Then again, you look at the NFL and the best rivalry for the longest time was about the best — Colts-Patriots. There’s also a theory that because Hamilton has put so many people in college and the NFL and because Chandler has done the same, that it just has to do with the best players being on the field. It really depends. Hamilton’s championships, and Chandler’s championship, have played a large role in making it that way but the truth is for such a long time that most other programs have their games against other people and they have their rivalries, but the Chandler one just got so heated so quickly that it didn’t matter if any of these kids ever went on the play in college. People were still wanting to beat the crap out of each other every time the game came around. I think that what it really comes down to is just being in the same city, having that shared history and now having the branding behind it and having the players that go on to play in college and the NFL. You have guys like Markus Wheaton on Monday Night Football saying Chandler High School. Stuff like that just increases the profile of both schools, which increases the profile of the rivalry.
FA: What is it like when you’re at Jerry Loper Field or at Austin Field for a Chandler-Hamilton game?
RA: When you’re at Chandler, the game is definitely an exciting, energetic sort of hostile almost environment. What’s nice about having the game at Chandler is that the visiting bleachers are so large, so so many people from Hamilton show up. Playing at Chandler has this reputation for being more intimidating than Hamilton for several reasons, so they love to kind of play that up a little bit. It’s just a lot of energy. When it’s at Hamilton, you get more of that traditional sort of Notre Dame feel to it. They treat it just like any other game. One of the things you’ll see is they wheel in tiny little makeshift rented bleachers if you’re a Chandler fan. They’ll accommodate you, but they’ll let you know it’s temporary. It’s a different feel depending on where it’s played, and the few times in the playoffs when it’s been a neutral site, it’s been a different energy. It really just depends on where it’s at. I would say that at Chandler it’s probably its most fun and Hamilton, for 10 years they hadn’t lost a game there. That’s when you can really feel Hamilton’s dominance, when it’s at Jerry Loper.
FA: Which games stand out to you from this rivalry?
RA: There’s a couple. Obviously Chandler winning for the first time was really big. ESPN game was big. The last-minute win when Brett Hundley up for Hamilton was big. There was a game, and I can’t even remember the year of it now, where it was out at Hamilton. I went with some friends and it was a year where I was just going as a spectator and we were told that this is the year. This is the year that Chandler has it figured out. They’re going to go in and they’re going to beat Hamilton. I remember Hamilton winning something like 35–0, and it was cool to see Hamilton just do their thing even when Chandler had that immense amount of hype going into the game. It’s really, really hard to choose because there have been so many good examples, but probably the playoff game where Hamilton got revenge on Chandler and got to go to a state championship and then the game before that where Chandler got their first victory probably made for the best set of in-season games they’ve ever had. I think there’s at least four different times now where they’ve met twice in one year.
FA: Thank you again, Ralph.
