You mad bro?

Rivals.  Rivalries.  Hated rivals.  Personal rivals.  Professional rivals.

Hello loyal readers, and welcome to a random post about rivals.  Prepare for either strong, or incredibly indifferent opinions on rivals.  

I have never had a sports rival.  Ever.  In all the years I participated in sports, there was not a single team that I would call a rival.  Certainly my high school, and club teams did have what were considered rivals, McMinnville in the case of soccer.  But rivals?  I cannot recall there being a team that made us get more fired up than other teams.  

We didn't like Tualatin and those made for some great games, but I wouldn't consider them a rival.  

We didn't like Sunset, but similar to Tualatin, I wouldn't consider them a rival.

To me, a rival is a program that you are born and bred to dislike.  Or hate if you prefer.  Generations come of age hating each other, and die hating each other.  You never wear their colors around your school or your town.  

Personally, I find most rivalries overblown, a gimmick of marketing.  It seems that every team in the country in every sport has a rival, but honestly, a rivalry to me is something special.

North Carolina vs. Duke.

Ohio State vs. Michigan. 

Those are rivalries.  

I went to Newberg HS.  Our rival was technically supposed to be McMinnville.  I think that rivalry mattered more for every other sport but ours.  Maybe it was that we didn't lose to them, or more likely, it was that our coach taught us that there were bigger fish to fry than any single team - making state and then a run at state were always program goals - but I never saw Mac as a rival in soccer.  

I went to Willamette for college.  It was not until years later, eight to be exact, that I discovered Willamette's rival was Lewis & Clark.  LC.  I had no idea.  I had no idea because we had a great relationship with LC Crew.  They cheered for us when we came from behind to nip Santa Clara at WIRAs my novice year, and we taught each other cheers to annoy Pacific Lutheran and Puget Sound.  I have much respect for Pio Nation.  

So what does it take to make a rival?  In my eyes, a few things need to happen.

1.  It must be mutual.  I've worked for a couple of programs that saw another program as a rival, and yet if you asked the other program, they would have had no idea that a rivalry existed.

2.  It must be reasonable.  Tagging along with that, I worked for a program that saw a top D1 program as their rival.  Yet short of a miracle several orders of magnitude greater than the 1980 "Miracle on Ice" and a lot of cheating, there was simply no possible way for the program to beat the D1.

3.  It must be long standing, and not personal.  This means that the rivalry must predate the current iteration of the program by several generations, and that the rivalry must be living, and not something created by current staffing or athletes.

4.  It cannot be one sided.  Going back to point #2, the rivalry cannot be all and nothing.  Stanford Women's basketball is 67-0 all time against Washington State University Women's basketball.  That is not a rivalry.  Cambridge 84 to Oxford 80 is a rivalry.  

5.  It must stir passions of all involved.  I spoke with a friend who is an excellent coach.  He has been in as intense a rival as one might find in rowing, two rivalries in fact, and he has said that creating hate or feeling hate isn't easy.  It can be under the right circumstances, but it's not exactly natural.  I believe that, and buy that.  In order for it to be a rivalry, for me, then all who get involved must feel that set of emotions.

6.  You can't switch sides.  The hatred runs too deep to consider moving from one program to the other. 

Generally, I find rivalries in sport to be a waste of time, energy and spirit.  Why invest that much emotion into a single race?  I like the approach my high school coach had where beating Mac was seen as a step along the journey toward the ultimate goal.  

I've heard coaches talk about rivalry races as checkpoints, or as ways to build a psychological advantage over the other.  I've heard coaches say that if they can beat a rival, they know they will do well throughout the season, assuming that rival is good.  

I do not have a program rival.  I do have programs that I like to beat, but there isn't a program out there that I see as a rival.  Losing to them hurts equally as losing to anyone.  Beating them gives me as much a boost as beating another.  

Personal rivals though.  That's a bit different, and another topic for another time.

The 2002 Willamette Men's N8 on its way to winning the Governor's Cup against "rivals" UPS, PLU & LC