Shy of state playoffs, Carroll settles for its first Roman holiday

Kyle Detweiler feels the push and pull endemic to Thanksgiving football in Pennsylvania these days.

Playing on Thanksgiving requires a concession — that your program isn’t playing in the PIAA tournament.

There’s a “but” to append there, or rather a sizable series of them. But if you’re a Catholic League team not named St. Joseph’s Prep, La Salle or Archbishop Wood, you’re ohfor-a-dozen on PIAA tournament qualification.

But as long as Imhotep Charter is a Class 4A powerhouse, Thanksgiving isn’t in jeopardy.

But what about those neighborhood rivalries that sustained for decades, before everyone and their pastor started chasing PIAA titles?

Detweiler has taken a step toward returning Thanksgiving football to Carroll with the Patriots’ game against Roman Catholic Wednesday night (6:30, Plymouth Whitemarsh High).

“I think between our alumni and the schools and the relationship of the school presidents, it was something that our biggest supporters and our fans, Carroll families, Roman Catholic families, it was a tradition they wanted to see continue,” Detweiler said this week.

The game was originally scheduled for Thursday morning at A.A. Garthwaite Stadium in Conshohocken, but a scheduling conflict forced the schools to move the venue and day, Detweiler said.

Neither school is a stranger to Thanksgiving. Carroll played Malvern Prep on the holiday from 1984-2000. Roman had a nearly 50-year rivalry with Roxborough that ended in 2018, when the Cahillites blanked the Indians, 35-0, for their only win of the year. Roxborough’s last win in the series came in 1992.

The Catholic League crossover game fills a need for both.

“It’s one of the greatest traditions at Roman and it means a lot to a lot of people,” Roman athletic director Matt Griffin said. “It also gives our players an extra opportunity to compete and play. It’s been absolutely terrific, a terrific environment and something that people enjoy.”

As Thanksgiving games become a rarer species — only 15 remain in Pennsylvania, 13 in Districts 1 and 12 — the sorting in the Catholic League is particularly salient. Schools like Father Judge (against Abraham Lincoln) and Archbishop Ryan (against George Washington) have kept rivalries alive, while Roman has sought to maintain tradition. Others, like Bonner-Prendergast and Cardinal O’Hara have tried unsuccessfully to spark series.

But others have pivoted away from the holiday. Neumann-Goretti discontinued its rivalry with Southern, first when the Saints put the program on hiatus in 2016, then because it was in the state quarterfinals in 2017. Conwell-Egan, a state semifinalist in Class 2A in 2017, no longer plays Harry S Truman. The Eagles went from 14-1 in 2018 to 2-8 this year.

Teams like Roman, Judge and Ryan are stuck under the iron heel of Prep and La Salle, who have monopolized every Catholic League PIAA bid in the highest classification since the league started vying for stat titles in 2008. Wood has owned every bid in the second-highest classification (old AAA, new 5A).

The cold calculus is that unless you’re in the elite echelon of programs, you’re unlikely to fulfill a central preseason goal: Walking off a winner in the last game. Unless, of course, you opt to play on Thanksgiving.

“Obviously we’re striving to play in the postseason,” Griffin said. “But this is a great opportunity for us to play for something meaningful. It means a lot to the players and it’s a very competitive game.”

“I don’t have any problem saying this: Our hope would be at some point in the future, you’re making a long playoff run and we don’t have to play this game or this game becomes something different because we’re still in the mix of a district or state playoffs,” Detweiler said. “For our guys, we used to say, with six classifications, there’s only six teams that end their season with a win and those are the state champs. And at least for this group, which had a really tough end to their district semis with that loss to Bonner, they get a chance at redemption and maybe getting some of that taste out of their mouth, and especially for our seniors to end their careers with a win, that’s a pretty great opportunity.”