Blackhawks, Trojans finally set to meet

Call it a new take on Monday Night Football, under lights and on the fancy field turf at Liberty High School.

It’s not the Jets and Dolphins on national television, but when Floyd T. Binns and Cedar Lee meet for a middle school football game Monday at 7 p.m. it will be a contest that was decades in the making.

The two schools are just 16 miles apart. Binns has racked up more than a few perfect seasons in recent years and dominates its competition more often than not. Cedar Lee has won the unofficial
Fauquier County middle school championship the past seven years. But the Blackhawks and Trojans have never played a regular season game.

The two squads have scrimmaged several times in recent years, but the schedules have never worked out so that the two teams met in a game that counted. Finally, this year, school officials decided that needed to change and decided to play a game on a Monday night and do it at the nicest football stadium in either county.

Adding to the intrigue is how just about everyone involved in the game seems to be connected one way or another.

Cedar Lee athletics director Dave Richardson was the head coach of an unbeaten, unscored-upon team at the then Culpeper Junior High in 1987. Nat Yates and Eddie Jenkins were players on that team. Both Yates and Jenkins have sons playing for Binns this year.

Dobie White was another player on that 1987 team and currently is an assistant coach at Binns, along with Worth Richardson, Dave’s son.

Dave Richardson was also the defensive line coach at Culpeper County High School when the Blue Devils won a state title in 1999. The Devils’ offensive line coach was Steve Parker, whose son Todd plays for Binns.

The connections even go beyond football. In the 1990s Marie Griffith, Sheri Harkness, Pam Gatewood, Steve Parker and Lynne Richardson — Dave’s wife — were sponsors of the Supernova Academic Team at CMS. Today Harkness is the principal at Floyd T. Binns with Gatewood an assistant principal. Parker is the principal at Cedar Lee and Lynne Richardson teaches science there.

There are plenty more ties between the two schools and the two teams, too many to name actually, but the point is that this figures to be more than just your typical middle school football game.

Bealeton is so close, but it seems far away in a lot of ways because of the pesky county line. It’s unfortunate Binns and Cedar Lee haven’t played before. For that matter, it’s a shame district realignment means Culpeper and Eastern View don’t play Liberty more.

But it should be fun to see a new rivalry born on Monday. It might not be a made-for-TV event. It isn’t even made-for-radio, but that doesn’t matter. Plenty of people are going to enjoy it.