REVISITING THE FIRST NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP GAME AND MORE…PART 1

I had planned on doing just one blog on the first high school national championship team. I've used the analogy before...to paraphrase Forest Gump, when you do research, you never know what you're going to get. I got a lot more than what you will see in the three, but I condensed the information, and the one blog has turned into three. It's all history. I hope you like them.

One of the first stories that was in my book and the very first story blog was a reprint of the book-story on the 1897 Madison High School championship team…1897 Madison (8-2-1) - National Champions (wihifootball.com).

I was looking at some old national football records and here it is, three and a half years later from that above first post and I’ve decided to expand on the Madison High School story.  Madison High was opened in 1853 in the basement of a Methodist church with 90 students and one teacher.  It grew out of that location and eventually was finally located near Johnson Street and Wisconsin Avenue, not far from the state capitol.  Over the years the school expanded as did the student population.  In 1893 the school played its first football game, as noted in my blog on early football teams…NOTES ON SOME EARLY FOOTBALL PROGRAMS…PART 1 (wihifootball.com).  In 1894 the school had 354 young people attending classes.  Madison may have been a town/city of about 15,000 people but it could still be considered a large farming community despite it being the Wisconsin capitol.  Kids from all over attended school there.  Also noted in the above blogs the school had a powerhouse football and other sports program.  After posting a series of successful seasons (1893 3-0-0, 1894 7-1-0, 1895 5-0-0 and 1896 going 5-2-0), things for the Tigers looked bright for the upcoming 1897 season.  Their only two losses in 1896 were to the University of Wisconsin. The team had sent off to the local university several very good players, but they still had a solid core.  The team manager, Joseph Jackson got bold and worked three games against college teams as well as seven high school squads into the schedule.  Remember, the early games in a season were often set up and then the rest of the year was on a week-to-week basis.  Most games were on Saturday but there could be two games during a week.  Most seasons started in October, so it wasn’t unusual to play a December game now and then.  After “Tigers “mauled Oregon HS 32-0 in the season opener the Madison boys destroyed Evansville 50-0.  Now came a game against the University of Wisconsin at Camp Randall.  Though the team lost to the Badgers, against some of their old classmates, they only gave up two touchdowns (Four points each) in an 8-0 loss.  The Badgers were led by 25-year-old All-American fullback/kicker, Pat O'Dea. Next up was a battle with Whitewater Normal that resulted in a 10-10 tie.   The next week they beat a very good Waukesha team 30-0 but suffered several key injuries.

Again, manager Jackson worked a match against the University of Wisconsin, again at Camp Randall, but things turned disastrous as Madison took it on the chin 29-0.  The game was before a remarkable crowd of about 3,000 fans, huge for a high school game at that time but most were probably there to cheer on the University.  Those previous injuries kept several stars out of the game.  The school would have lost but maybe by a lessor margin.  Madison took a week off (Only because Eau Claire High backed out of a scheduled meet which Madison took as a forfeit but later dropped that from their official record) and then they played the top team in Minnesota, Minneapolis South and came away a 14-0 winner.  Things were now back on track. 

They followed up the Minneapolis victory with a victory over a Milwaukee high school, possibly East Side as South Side had cancelled the matchup of the two schools over eligibility issues.  No official record exists in any of the two school s records or newspaper accounts but the game was reported in a December Madison newspaper season account as a win.  Or, maybe, because South cancelled at the last-minute Madison may have called it a win by forfeit but the story is unclear.  As I mentioned above, the Eau Claire game was cancelled but maybe it was with enough notice and not the day of the game.  A possible three other games that season were also cancelled against Watertown, Janesville and Fort Atkinson when those schools voided their initial agreements.  Jackson also tried to get games with Beloit and Rockford (IL) but was unable to secure a suitable play date   Where all these games would have fit in but I’m sure there might have been several two games in a weeks' time.  A solid 22-0 victory against powerhouse Delafield St. John’s Military Academy followed the Milwaukee game and then a game against Elgin (IL) high school that resulted in a 28-0 win. 

The season seemed to be over to the players but not to the ingenious Joe Jackson.  Somehow, he learned of a team back east in New York that claimed to be the top team in the East if not the nation.  So, Jackson made contact with the North Tonawanda school and after multiple telegrams and phone calls he was able to get that school to agree to play Madison. 

NOTE: Moving forward I may occasionally use the initials NT to refer to North Tonawanda.

Now, they needed a place to play and formally set a date.  Jackson’s players were very agreeable to playing one more game for a “National Title”.  Remember, the team had no formal coach.  Jackson, a senior at Madison High School, drew up some plays as did the team captain, left tackle Lucius Donkle, and a few of the other players.  Jackson’s main job was to get games scheduled, get the players to and from the game and settle the game receipts. He was an ingenious young man who later became a manager of his brother, Dr. James Jackson’s medical clinic and a civic leader.

So, here we are, early December 1897.  The game was set up through a third party from the Detroit Athletic Club who offered to host the game on Christmas Day.  North Tonawanda had been proclaimed by the upper New York press as the “Champion of the East”.  Football west of Pittsburgh and the Allegany Mountains was considered to be “backwater, not capable of standing up to the “superior” eastern powers.   

Chicago Tribune, December 9, 1897

With the game set up, all the two teams needed to do was get ready and get to the train station for the trip to Detroit.  On Madison’s side they got help from several UW football players…Harry F. Cochems (An assistant athletic director, student and a back-up member of the Badger football team) and UW freshman Joe Dean (A member of Madison Highs 1894-96 teams) Cochems and Dean worked the team for three hours a day, for the three weeks in the sun, the rain and snow to get the Madison boy’s ready.  Much more about those UW helpers later but first, how did North Tonawanda become known as the best team in the East?  That’s a good question.

 Some of the other early Eastern high school powerhouses:  William Penn Charter (Philadelphia, PA), Germantown Academy (Fort Washington, PA), Haverhill (MA), Salem (MA) and New Briton (Conn) were all some of the top teams in the period 1892-1899 but none were undefeated in 1897.  They all had at least one loss, several with two defeats they weren’t in the mix to be called one of the East’s top team that year.  NT was a regularly powerful team in the upper New York area and they ended the regular season with a 5-0-0 record with multiple games cancelled.  Maybe the press from Erie, Buffalo, Erie and Rochester just pumped the team up and the rest of the region bought in.  Anyway, the game was on schedule.

The matchups of seasonal schedules were:

Today’s players average over 210 pounds but in the 1890’s size mattered a great deal as athletes were smaller in both weight and height.  If you look at the last line of the “Off to Detroit” story you will see that it says the two teams will average 147 pounds.  In reality, North Tonawanda’s squad averaged only 138 pounds while the Madison team was a “heavy” 165.  That size would be a big difference in the game along with the coaching from Dean and Cochems.  Publicity and fans from New York showed their teams red and blue colors around NT’s headquarters, the St. Claire Hotel in downtown Detroit.  Even football fans living in the Detroit area seemed to favor the Eastern squad.  The Lumberjacks seemed to be at ease and freely mingled with their fans. Meanwhile, at the Wayne Hotel, about a mile away the Madison Tigers were keeping things low key and stayed behind closed doors until just before game time.  Their quiet and restrained manner worked well for the pre-game meetings.

The Detroit Athletic Club was formed in 1887 to encourage armature athletics.  They built a large bicycle track and a clubhouse nearby.  The football game would be played on the inner grass area of the quarter-mile track.  There were no grandstands at the time of the championship game.  Located between Woodward Ave., Forest Ave. East, Cass Ave. and Canfield Ave.  The Club would later relocate about two and a half miles closer to the Detroit River and it now is only about two blocks from Comerica Park, home of the Detroit Tigers baseball team.

Christmas morning the sky was clear with temperatures in the low 20’s but it would get to about 30 with no snow in the forecast.  The game was scheduled to start at 2:30pm.  North Tonawanda decided to leave the hotel early by walking and arrived at the Detroit Athletic Club about three miles north at about 11:45am followed by about 30 rooters.  Madison stayed at the St. Claire until close to game time and they didn’t spend a lot of time warming up.  It would be an interesting battle.

Next up, the game and afterwards.

LEADER OF THE EDGAR WILDCATS

Prelude:

Friday night, September 30, 1966, was the start of the of the longest game in state history.  I’ve found teams that played each other twice in the regular season back in the early days of Wisconsin High School football.  The state record book shows that Wauzeka vs. LaFarge on October 9, 1981, and Waukesha South vs. West Bend East on September 5, 2008, all played six overtime periods with each game lasting nearly four hours.  Yet, these are not the longest game (s).

In the third quarter St. Croix Central’s Don Riley picked up a “fumble” that went through the legs of an Elmwood player on a punt.  Riley ran 15-yards for the only score of a scoreless matchup of two undefeated Dunn-St. Croix Conference teams. Central failed to convert the extra point and the score ended 6-0.  The ball appeared to have touched the leg of the Elmwood player and that constitutes a “muff”, something that cannot be advanced because he never had possession of the ball.  After the game one of the officials contacted WIAA official Lew Ansorge for clarification of the rule.  On October 24 the WIAA ruled that the officials were in error and the game needed to be replayed from the point of the muff.

There had been sometimes, previously, when the game, ruled by the WIAA, had to be replayed from the start but this time the game would be played from the middle of the third quarter and moving forward.  William Shay, superintendent of St. Croix Central, had filed a counter protest with the WIAA saying that the Board of Control violated the spirit of the constitution in making a hasty decision.  St. Croix Central’s protest was overturned, and the game was tentatively scheduled for November 3 to be played in Elmwood, where the game from September had started. 

On Thursday, November 3 at 1:45pm the game resumed.  Elmwood, a village of about 750 people, was nearly deserted.  Few cars were on the streets.  It seemed that everyone in town was at the high school football game.  An afternoon game on a Thursday was an unusual time to play.  Many St. Croix students and team fans made the 27 miles to watch the game.  St. Croix Central was undefeated with an overall 7-0-0 record, (6-0-0 in conference play) not counting the earlier battle with Elmwood.  They had just won their second consecutive conference title, but this would be a battle.  Elmwood was 5-2-0 and in second place in the Dunn-St. Croix conference with a 5-1-0 posting.  If Elmwood won, the championship would mean that the two schools actually tied for the title.

First, the game officials had to determine where to place the ball.  It had gone through the legs of the Elmwood punt returner, glanced off of a leg and was picked up on the 15-yard line.  Was it the 22 or the 23-yard line?  Even the two head coaches differed as to where the ball should be placed.  The officials compromised and put it on the 22 ½ and it was St. Croix’s ball. With six minutes remaining in the third period history was being made. Nearly five weeks after the first game it finally resumed.  St. Croix Central drove the distance in seven plays, picking up two first downs as fullback Norm Ross crashed over from the one for the touchdown.  On the try for the extra point Ross was again given the ball but defensive back, junior Jerry Sinz came up and tackled him behind the line and the score stood 6-0.  With less than two minutes left in the final period Elmwood’s quarterback Jeff Fischer tossed the ball to Jeff Nelson who made a fingertip catch between two defenders in the end zone for an Elmwood score. Fullback Jim Bock fought his way over the goal for the extra point and then Elmwood hung on to win 7-6 and a tie for the conference title.

Edgar:

The 1966 game was the first-time defensive back Jerry Sinz got major recognition, but it wouldn’t be the last.  Jerry graduated from Elmwood in 1968 and went on to attend UW-Stout where he was a three-year letterwinner and started at safety and as a punt returner for two years.  Upon graduating in 1972 he took a teaching/coaching position at Edgar, and he’s been there ever since. 

Edgar started playing football in 1962 and after thirteen seasons and five previous head coaches, Edgar offered the position in 1975 to the young coach and he has built a powerhouse.  The first season was a learning process for Sinz, his small staff of assistants and the players as Edgar went 3-6.  A member of the Marawood Conference the Wildcats won the conference title in 1976 and 1977. A sort of down year followed in 1978 (5-4) and then 1979 came along and the team went 12-0 and won the WIAA Division 4 title with an 11-6 win over Iowa-Grant. 

After the 1979 title, things just got better for Edgar and Jerry Sinz.   Through the decades:

What a great record!!!

The first Edgar high school opened in 1909.  The students played intermural sports like basketball and baseball for several years.  In 1926-27 the boys played basketball had their first  official school vs. school competition and they made it to the district tournament and posted an 11-5 season record.  Other sports came along in the 1930’s…boxing, softball, track, volleyball and tennis, to name a few.  But no football until 1962.   Prior to Jerry Sinz taking over as head coach Edgar had only posted a 43-57-1 record (1962-75).

I had a great talk with Coach Sinz back in February.  He said that after being an assistant for three seasons that there had been some talk of the sport being shut down following a combined 5-13 record for 1973-74.  The previous coach had left and Sinz stepped in.  Moral was low among the players and he was determined to turn things around.  It wasn’t an instant success as the team posted a 3-6 season in 1976.  But since then, the program has grown.  

But how has Sinz and Edgar been so successful?  First, he wanted to make things fun for the players.  He began to get the team involved in the community as a way of building relationships.  One of those programs is helping make the community more aware of breast cancer and how to prevent it. Another way that he has been able to build cohesiveness in his squads is trying to get his players to show marked improvement in their on-field performance as well as in the classroom.  He stresses good rest for his players and, with his assistants coaching other sports, build their speed, quickness, agility and strength.  Music is a way to build team spirit in the locker room.  The players love to sing along and mug it up.

Jerry taught math and technical education & engineering until 2014 when he retired.  He interacted with students in the classroom as well as on the football field and spent time as an assistant in both basketball and track.  In building a large coaching staff, eleven people listed in the 2023 WIAA State Championship program (Many of whom are former Edgar players) Sinz’s staff also coach other sports as well.  By doing so, they, under the goals of the football program, mentor their players in staying in good health, build comradery and reaching out to help other students and athletes.   There is no doubt that the interaction of Sinz and his assistants has been crucial in building a program that in the 2023-24 season only had 201 students in the school.   Some schools that have low student numbers like Edgar have moved to 8-player football but not the Wildcats.  The state championship program listed 42 players on the roster, a great accomplishment in school/team involvement.

Coach and I talked about a a number of things. He likes working with new coaches, spends time speaking at clinics and teaching religious classes.  I had asked Bob Hyland of Fond du Lac St. Mary’s Springs a few years ago if he had been approached by other schools to move to different program.  Afterall, he had been having great success and the head coaching spot at Fond du Lac Goodrich High School had become open several times over the years and he said that he had not been officially approached about that job or any other which surprised me.  I asked Coach Sinz the same question and he said there had been a few feelers a while back but he couldn’t see the need to make a jump.  It seems that these two coaches’, who have played against each other a few times over the years in the playoffs simply love the school and the town where they are at.  A good comfort zone.  And why not stay when you have a great coaching staff and students who are proud of what they have accomplished.

Speaking of the Edgar staff, it was Troy Andreshak who responded to my request for some additional school statistical information.  Thanks, Troy.  What he sent was, well, a boat load of material.  Like Patrick Foran at Milwaukee Marquette (See links to that school’s athletic records in my blog… EARLY UPDATES ON THIS SEASON SO FAR (wihifootball.com) and Travis Winkers at Darlington who has built a very good file on that school’s all-time win/loss records as well as some player statistical records, Troy sent me a terrific file on Edgar’s history… Edgar Football Records - Google Sheets.  Then, he followed up several emails on stats that were missing from the state records book.  At this time, I asked if he could intercede and ask Coach Sinz if he would talk to me and I got the positive reply I had hoped for. 

On the football field Troy works with the wide receivers and linebackers.

Another assistant is Andrew Lukasko who I met while visiting my nephew, Eric Kossoris, in Madison after a Badger football game.  Andrew and Eric were both walk-on’s and ended up being roommates.  Again, Andrew and I only spent a few minutes talking about Edgar football but it weas fun.  Andrew is the head wrestling coach as well as an assistant track coach and he is the Special Teams Coordinator and works with the defensive backs and running backs.

The other assistants, and not to be slighted as they do a great job are Greg Streit is the defensive coordinator and works with the linebackers and the offensive line.  Greg teaches technology education as well as being head coach for both the boys and girls track teams.  Chris Trawicki works as the offensive coordinator as well as being the quarterback and defensive back coach. Chris is the Technology Coordinator instructor and serves as the assistant boys’ basketball coach.  Nathan Dahl is a science teacher at the high school and middle school football head coach as well as working with the varsity on the offensive and defensive lines.  Adam Decker works with the offensive and defensive lines and teaches Physical Education.  Earl Rau coaches the quarterbacks and linebackers and teaches high school social studies.  Eric Hafferman and Kaleb Hafferman are volunteer coaches who work with the defensive backs and running backs.  Zach Paul, another volunteer coach, deals with the tight ends/slots and the defensive line.  John Peterlik, the fourth volunteer is the middle school co-head coach and helps with the varsity linebackers and running backs.  The volunteer coaches attend most practices and all games.  Other than Coach Sinz and Coach Streit and the two middle school coaches the others rotate coaching the JV and JV2.  Why mention all this?  Because the coaches also work as a team.  They deal with multiple teams besides the varsity, overlapping responsibilities and work as a unit to develop a strong program in a small community that is proud of what has been accomplished. 

One of the final questions I had for coach Sinz was how much longer will he coach?  He had thought of retiring a few years back but after the 2020 COVID season he decided to stay on.  With 470 career wins is he thinking of going for the magic number, 500?  Two years ago, I wrote a blog about the 1976 Antigo team and their coach, Gordy Schofield who retired with 199 career wins.  Two years before the Antigo story, Dave Keel of Homestead High School retired after 30-years with 292 career wins.  Schofield could have coached one more season to get to 200 and Keel could have coached another as well to get to 300 wins.  When I asked Bob Hyland of St. Mary’s Springs how much longer he was going to coach…he had 493 wins at the time, he said that he was going to retire but his grandson asked that he stay on until 2024 so he, Hyland, could coach him.

Jerry Sinz told me that when it was time it was time.  Like Gordy Schofield and others, it’s not about the numbers but the lessons you teach.  The lives you touch.  Edgar’s Coach Sinz has done that over the years and he and his plyers and assistants have done it well:

49 Seasons/48 Consecutive Winning Seasons (1975-2023)

470 Career Wins   An .836 winning percentage

37 WIAA Playoff Appearances (96-28 Record)

25 Seasons of 10+ Wins

20 Undefeated Regular Seasons

8 WIAA Championships/5-Time Runner-up/Titles in Five              Different Decades

Thanks, coach, for your time.

EAST VS. WEST

While researching for an upcoming blog I ren across some interesting stories from the early days of the sport that I wish to pass on.  A lot of this blog are the actual stories taken from the Green Bay Press-Gazette.

Back in 2019 when I was writing my book, I contacted the Athletic Director at Green Bay East, Scott Millien, about various research subjects and he sent me a copy of a 15-year-old football program from the 2005 Green Bay East vs. Green Bay West game that commemorated the two schools playing annually for 100-years.  The program, really a book, is 118-pages and is crammed with useful details for my writings.   

In the program for the East/West game there were lists of the two school’s yearly records.  The book showed that East’s program begam in 1896 and West’s in 1905.  The majority of the program was written by Cliff Christl, then with the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, and is now the official historian of the Green Bay Packers.  I did a search on Newspapers.com (They are owned by Ancestry.com) for the Green Bay Press-Gazette’s archives and looking at the game program the records and I find that the rivalry go’s back a little farther.

 Now for some sort of non-football history: 

Fort Howard was a military army base built during the War of 1812 on the west side of the Fox River opposite Green Bay. It was used to help protect the settlers from the British coming in from Canada, should that happen.  It closed and re-opened several times during the early to mid-1800’s and was finally decommissioned as a military base and Civil war enlistment center in 1863.  Farms, homes and businesses gathered around Fort Howard and the borough was first incorporated in 1856.  Small is overall size the town was annexed by Green Bay in 1895.  Fort Howard had a school named the McCartney School that became a high school and while the name wasn’t officially changed until 1910 to Green Bay West the school was known as old West High or West Side.  In 1926 a new school was built to replace the older McCarthey site.  In 1895 the school had a small student population.

Somewhere in the 1890’s-1920’s the school mascot and nickname the Wildcats came into being.  Green Bay East opened in 1856 and finally had its first graduating class in 1875.  That school moved to a new building that opened in 1898 and they became the Hilltoppers.  That school building was eventually replaced with a newer building in 1924 and since then they have been known as the Red Devils.

EAST vs. WEST

Things now get tricky.  If you have used the search engine on Newspapers.com sometimes what you are looking for doesn’t easily pop up.  That was the case when I checked prior to the “official” start of East’s football program, 1896.  They had a genuinely bland record, going 1-2-0.  In my search I used “Green Bay East High School Football”, “East Side Football” and just plain “High School Football”.  Using the first two searches, and this is where you can get confused.  I found several stories of games from 1895 where the Green Bay Team” or Green Bay High was playing against a team such as Oconto or Menomonie (MI).  Well, I thought it was Green Bay High but it really was a “city team” made up of older guy’s however it appears that bigger high schoolers may have also played for the City Team ... A precursor to pro football because they played for fun and occasionally a little travel money but also because they loved the game. 

 When you type in a name to search on Newspapers.com and you are just selecting a month or year, the response will come up with whatever they find and it may not be in order by date.  So, I went into 1894 and typed in Green Bay East High School Football.  What came up was stories from the entire year with a mention of East High, football and occasionally Green Bay High football. And there it was, one of the first stories was a report of a game that the “Green Bay Team” played against Menomonie (MI) (Also a town team) on October 26 and won 10-4.  So, finding that I thought I had found a game that East had played.  I was wrong. It was the East Side Town Team.  Sifting down the list of stories I finally found an expected game for East High against Milwaukee West scheduled for November 1 but I couldn’t find a score.  They may have played or maybe it was cancelled.  No records. 

Here's where things changed for East vs. West.

After spending several days looking at newspapers I thought that both East and West started playing football in 1894.  There was some confusion with information from the newspaper.  It came in the names the newspaper used for the teams.  1894 was the official beginning of the sport in Green Bay.  In the spring of 1894 Fred Hulbert graduated from Wayland University in Beaver Dam.  He was a star player for the school team.  He was a 25-year-old, born in Chicago and raised in Racine who took a job as a clerk with the Union Laundry in Green Bay and with him he brought the first known football (Previous versions had been rugby balls…similar is size and shape but different) to appear in the city.  Fred joined the West Side Athletic Association and gathered members to form a team.  Again, the newspaper would confuse the name of the team and finally in 1896 the team would be called “The Green Bay Team”.   Just because the West Side Athletic Association didn’t mean that it was located in the Fort Howard area but on the west side of the Fox River.

In 1895 the two high schools began to show interest in the sport and on September 21, 1895, the two teams met, sort of. 

From the Green Bay Press-Gazette, September 22, 1895

Looks official, doesn’t it.  It wasn’t.  While this was the “official” lineup but in reality, well, read the complete newspaper story below:

Yes, only eight players showed up against ten.  Look at the players’ names.  Fred Hulbert, 25-years old, the team captain and coach of The Green Bay Team did play quarterback and scored both touchdowns for West. 15-year-old Fred Hurlbut, Jr. did play halfback for East.  Both would play a big part in the history of Green Bay football as well as in the city’s business history.  Why was Hulbert allowed to play with high schoolers?  Well, in the early days of the high school sport some coaches would sometimes play with their school age athletes.  Did you read the previous blogs on early football as well as a few mentions in my book.

The game ended in a 8-8 tie but the two teams agreed to play the next week.

And they did play on September28 as reported in the Sunday September 29 paper.

A man named James Armstrong was the referee. 

A long story for what would be considered a scrimmage.

Note that the roster has Fred Hurlbut, Jr. was listed as the left end but sometime during the game he was shifted to halfback, as he played in the first game, and he scored a touchdown.  Again, Fred Hulbert played for the West High team and scored the touchdown for West. 

According to a Wikipedia note about the long series between the two schools, Cliff Christl stated that this tie game was a “practice or scrimmage and not an official game but the brief story in the Press-Gazette doesn’t mention this.  To the news story it read like it was a game.  The next week when they played again, this time with East winning 6-4.  East would play Lawrence University and lose 64-0 and then on Thanksgiving Day lose to Fond du Lac 14-0.  West would lose to Fond du Lac early in November 14-4.  A game against Stevens Point Normal never had a game report in the Press-Gazette or the Stevens Point Journal.  That gives East with an official record of 0-2-0 while West had an official 0-0-1 record.  BUT a story by Christl in 2018 stated that East actually had, after finding more information, a 1-5-0 record, not counting the two practices.  There was a score of a victory by the East Side team over Menomonie (MI), 40-0 but that was a confusing report.  I didn’t find but the two games scores actually attributed to East High School in the paper.  Confused?  I guess Cliff had better resources. 

So, there you have the East vs. West story for 1895.  They played each other before the “official” start date of 1905 and West did have a team.  West appeared, to my research, to not field a team in 1896 but the school did play a game in 1897 and end with a 1-0-0 record followed by a 3-0-0 record in 1898   The two games in 1895 should be considered as practice and not official but they did meet in some fashion.  In the end It was noted in several stories that with the two schools, now part of the Green Bay school system, authorities thought that the two should not play each other.  That changed beginning in 1905.  Why did it take so long for the two schools to officially play each other?  Well, it was for several reasons.  First, Green Bay West had a lot fewer students as opposed to East.  It took a while for things to balance out.  The other reason was that the school officials couldn’t agree to the team of the game…location and the amount of what each team would receive in the gate receipts.  Since a good number of young people, boy’s and girl’s, didn’t attend school at the the time of the 1895 meetings, the games could have been made up of both students and others, maybe as young as 12 and, in the case of Fred Hulbert, age-25. 

Several other side issues to briefly discuss.  First, at the beginning of the blog I mentioned that Green Bay annexed Fort Howard which was on the west side, but the city also annexed Preble in the 1960’s and garnered Preble High School…Merger vote 50 years ago created Green Bay's east side (greenbaypressgazette.com)

Next, Fred Hulbert seemed to get hurt a lot playing for his Green Bay Team.  There are multiple stories in the 1894-1897 paper where he was injured.  In one game he received a broken nose and a doctor watching the game rushed to aid him.  The Green Bay Team were also involved in games where they protested a ruling by the referee and just walked off the field.

Finally, if you get a little confused by the two Fred’s, Hulbert and Hurlbut, Jr., you aren’t the only one.  Check out this story by Christl…about half way down the posting…Packers Fan from Ukraine asks about team’s first coach.  Fred Hurlbut Sr, was a green Bay industrialist and Jr. took over the business and prospered until his death in 1957.  Hurlbert opened a canning business in Green Bay and would later move on to Port Washington and found the Saukville Canning Company.  He died at age 67 in 1937.