Salt Bowl brings together two towns and rivals
Each fall, thousands of fans descend on War Memorial Stadium in Little Rock. With painted faces and their team colors, these fans are primed and pumped to root for their home teams.
And no, these aren’t Razorback fans — they’re fans of Benton and Bryant high schools.
The Salt Bowl, which highlights the rivalry between the two schools and gives the winning side bragging rights for a whole year, has become one of the biggest games in Arkansas high school football.
“The atmosphere of the Salt Bowl is what high school football and all high school sports were meant to be like,” said Tom Farmer, a former coach at Benton High School and former athletic director at Bryant. “If you have seen TV shows where the entire community shows up to support their team, that is what it is like. It makes you think of high school football at its best.”
For the past 13 years, the game between the Benton Panthers and the Bryant Hornets has been played at War Memorial Stadium.the game simply became too big for either school’s stadium.
“One year when the game was at Benton, there were people on top of their school’s buses trying to see the game,” he said. “we knew we had to find a venue that would support the crowds we were having, and the crowds we could have if there were seats.”
But where did the name Salt Bowl come from? Farmer said that T.J. Sivewright, a local business owner, offered to buy a trophy for the game, and he told Farmer to come up with a name for the contest.
Farmer began asking around for ideas and was told that in the past, Native Americans would travel up the Saline River to trade for salt. thus the Salt Bowl was born.
Before the game, fans of both schools don their respective colors — maroon for the Benton folk, blue for the Bryant fans — and gather outside the stadium for tailgating and community spirit.
“We are neighbors except for the times we compete in sports,” Farmer said.
In the past, the Salt Bowl was the first game of the season for the teams, but this year, the game
will be in week 4, and the stakes are even higher. The Salt Bowl is now a conference game. “We’re excited about the opportunity to play this game as a conference game,” said Michael Lee, athletic director at Bryant.
Because the Salt Bowl draws between 20,000 and 27,000 fans each year, the game gives the players a chance to play in front of, maybe, the biggest crowd of their lives.
“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” Lee said.