Aug 25, 2016 4 min read

If you’re a football player who grew up in Charleroi or Monessen, the rivalry with kids from across the bridge starts early.

“(I was) 5 years old, flag football,” Cougars senior Errict Tedrow said. “When you sign up for football, that’s the first game your parents tell you about if they go to Charleroi. ‘Beware for the Charleroi-Monessen game.'”

Tedrow’s uncles and grandfather played in the headliner of the series for Charleroi High School on Friday nights in late August. And so will he.

“You’re born to play that game, basically,” Tedrow said.

For the past nine years, that opportunity hasn’t existed. In 2007, the annual meeting between the two neighboring communities, which began in 1907, stopped because of WPIAL realignment. The nine-game regular season saddled Class A Monessen and Class AA Charleroi with an eight-game conference schedule and a single non-conference matchup against a team in the same class picked by the WPIAL.

But the intense relationship between athletes on both sides hasn’t stopped or changed in the interim. In addition to the areas still facing each other in youth football, the varsity programs have scrimmaged the past four years.

“We never lost to Charleroi, though. Even in the scrimmages, we still beat them,” senior Monessen lineman Marc Gibson said.

What did disappear, though, was that platform for those who began facing off at such a young age to take the competitive history to its highest level: under the lights to start the high school football season. Tedrow worried he would never have the chance.

Well, it’s back.

This evening, Charleroi’s varsity football team will make the short drive across the Monessen-Charleroi Bridge to Memorial Stadium for a 7 p.m. kickoff against the Greyhounds.

It will be the 100th meeting between the teams. Charleroi leads the all-time series 47-43-9. Since 2003, Monessen has a 3-2 edge.

The most recent WPIAL shakeup, which occurred earlier this year, included a state-wide expansion from four enrollment classes to six. The process opened an additional space on the regular season schedule for both schools. Week Zero, as it is called, was the usual second scrimmage date. With an opportunity to play a nonconference game, it was obvious what needed to occur.

Once rumors flew about the reclassifications leaving an extra week, officials from both school districts began meeting to discuss renewing the historic contest.

“If this goes through, we’re playing you guys,” said third-year Charleroi coach Donnie Militzer.

The timing of the WPIAL decision was ideal because Militzer and Monessen coach Joe Salvino talked before this season about ending the scrimmage.

“A lot of players put so much emphasis on the scrimmage, after the scrimmage was over everything else was gone,” said Salvino, a 1970 Monessen graduate.

Senior Monessen lineman Damian Tineri said approaching a glorified practice the same way they would a game that counted made sense to the players because of who lined up on the other side.

“It’s Charleroi, and that rivalry still exists, regardless,” Tineri said.

Members of both communities agree. Salvino remembers how people would fill the stands at Memorial Stadium and the old Charleroi Stadium for the game, regardless of the record of the teams. Salvino described how before the structure was built, fans would pack the grassy hillside on which it stands and also make it so the other end zone would have to be roped off to keep people from spilling onto the field.

Such a frenzied environment is what Tedrow will soon walk into, as he and his teammates try to reverse what for many of them has been a one-sided outcome on the field since those flag football days.

“Monessen has beat me my whole life,” Tedrow said. “I would love to turn that around. The past is the past. It’s about now.”