I was covering a game weeks ago when I casually asked a Bentonville coach about the impending split with Bentonville West.
"There's only one Bentonville," he said.
Yes, but Bentonville West High School opens this fall, right?
"There's still only one Bentonville," he repeated.
OK. I get it.
Maybe the new school should have been named Benton County Central as my co-worker, Henry Apple, strongly suggested. BCC makes more sense, considering the new school is located in Centerton and not Bentonville.
Either way, it didn't take long to get this rivalry started.
The Bentonville breakup reminds me of 2005, when the Springdale School District split between Springdale High to the east and Har-Ber to the west. I walked up to a person from Springdale that year who was bad-mouthing someone from another school. I assumed it was Fayetteville, the Bulldogs' longtime rival.
But he was already angry at someone from Har-Ber, which one former Springdale coach describes as "The Emerald City." From the outside, the Bentonville split may be just as entertaining. From the inside, not so much.
Spring football practice begins Monday when West conducts workouts in the mornings at Bentonville High before the Tigers reclaim their facility in the afternoons. The football teams will also share Tiger Stadium for a year or two until the stadium in Centerton is completed.
It's an awkward situation for sure, like a couple headed for a breakup who share the same space and speak only when necessary. Not that I would know anything about that.
Well, not much.
"The rivalry has already started, definitely," said West coach Bryan Pratt, who was hired more than a year ago to lead the transition. "It's fueled even more because we share facilities and our offices are next to each other. But it's a good, clean rivalry. Those (Bentonville) coaches have been very hospitable to us, and I would never say anything bad about them."
Not yet, anyway.
Any tension at the athletic complex may be quaint compared to the noise being generated by the bands in Bentonville. The Bentonville Band Boosters executive committee voted in favor of maintaining its focus on Bentonville and letting West form its own booster club. That surprised some West parents, who hope to reverse the decision, primarily for monetary reasons.
"My gut tells me they'll stay separate, but we'll see," Chris Wall, Bentonville Band Booster president, said. "We're not going to cut (West) off in the first year, especially,"
As for football, West is joining the 7A-West at the right time. Fort Smith Northside and Fort Smith Southside will leave the conference and Van Buren still poses little threat after winning only three games when the Pointers were league members in 2012 and 2013.
The Wolverines could earn a playoff spot despite fielding a team without seniors this fall. West makes its debut Sept. 2 at Pryor, Okla., and opens conference against Van Buren at Tiger Stadium on Sept. 23.
On Nov. 4, Bentonville and West will meet for the first time at Tiger Stadium.
"They already know the date," Pratt said of his players. "Our kids are Wolverines, and we have a Wolverine Wednesday each week where the teachers and coaches who'll be at Bentonville West get together. The game against Bentonville is going to be fun, especially for the players and the community, but we've got a lot to do before then."
Bentonville has thoroughly dominated in recent years and won the national CBS MaxPreps Cup for all sports the past two years. That dominance will likely end this fall when Bentonville splits like Springdale and Rogers before it.
"Bentonville kills you with numbers," a former coach once said to me. "They come at you in waves."
Those waves will soon originate in Fayetteville, which remains a one-town team. As for the Tigers, a Bentonville football player said he expects his team to remain dominant and treat the Wolverines as just another team.
Like the breakup song, "You're just somebody that I used to know?"
Sounds like a rivalry to me.
Sports on 05/01/2016