By Jon Sicotte
July 5, 2008 - 12:00 a.m. EST

MILLINGTON — They are still rivals, they just won’t see each other on the gridiron starting this fall.

The Vassar High School football program has decided to end their 100-plus year affiliation with Millington in playing each other.

It’s a “he-said, they-said” situation for the most part, with both schools pointing fingers.

For Millington, they feel Vassar is ending a tradition because of the one-sidedness of the rivalry over the last 20 years.

For Vassar, it was just bad timing in trying to schedule non-conference opponents.

Vassar - a former Tri-Valley East team that is now a part of the Greater Thumb West - will play Caro (a Tri-Valley East rival), Ubly and Durand as their non-conference games this coming season.

“They tried to get out of their contract so we could play in Week 1,” Vassar athletic director Steve Gleeson said this week. “In the meantime, Caro popped up, so I talked to the coaches and we agreed it would be a good fit for Week 1.

“Millington got out of their first game, but by then we had our plans and I think they thought that it was going to be a done deal.”

Millington AD Dewey Munson said he understood Vassar trying to get comfortable with the new GTW, but still tried to add the Vulcans to the schedule for years to come.

The competition between the two schools goes back over a 100 years, but valid records show two very different dominate eras in the past half-decade.

As non-conference rivals, with records going back to 1955, Vassar led the series from then to 1980 with a 17-5-4 mark (76 percent winning percentage).

Since 1981, the Cardinals have been dominate, winning 23 of the 27 (85 percent) contests with the Vulcans only wins coming in 1984, 2001 and 2003.

The teams were traditionally non-conference foes. They did not join a league together until 1989 as Millington was added to the Thumb-B League for the final two seasons before becoming the Tri-Valley East in 1991. As conference foes, Millington was 17-2 against Vassar.

“It was fine when they were beating us 22 years out of 23 (sic),” Munson said of the time when the two schools played as non-conference foes. “But since we have had the better half of the second half of the rivalry...it’s just frustrating.”

The finger-pointing doesn’t stop the fact that the two schools will not play on the gridiron this season.

“If that is something that they want to do, then I guess, go ahead and do it,” Gleeson said about the complaints from the other side. “We certainly will entertain the thought of playing Millington in football again.

“This year, it’s just the scheduling was already made and we tried to get a game as quick as possible.”

It may be possible that Vassar may have scheduled non-conference opponents with the thought of winning six games total. That is the magical number for most teams to make the high school playoffs. A game against Millington in the past few decades usually meant a loss, something that Vassar - who is 17-21 since its only appearance in the playoffs (2003) - may have done to try to avoid at least one ‘L’ in the column.

At least according to some nay-sayers. But Gleeson wholeheartedly disagrees.

“I can understand that, I see where they are coming from,” he said. “We are trying to get a program back in the right direction. The playoffs is where we want to be. We aren’t throwing out Millington just because we want to make the playoffs. But we got to do, what we got to do too.

“If they want to look at it from that standpoint, it kind of ticks me off because they don’t see it from our view.”

“It had nothing to do with the rivalry or gate or relatives playing against relatives,” Munson said. “To us, if it was only about getting a win, we wouldn’t have scheduled Alma (22-9 last three seasons, 11-1 last year).”

Munson feels that Millington gave the Vulcans ample ways to figure out a way for the two schools to renew a rivalry again down the road after the Vulcans got used to their new rivals in the GTW.

“They basically did not want to work out anything with us,” he said. “We felt seven miles down the road... well you can’t just choose what you want to do, we are close enough, the gates are good, the rivalry is good.

“We should be playing each other.”

Although not set in concrete, the two schools most likely will not play scheduled contests in any sport - although Munson points out that they will be scheduled for many of the same tournaments in volleyball and wrestling, along with baseball and softball and the two could face each other there.

The schools will also continue a co-op in gymnastics under the Vassar mascot.

“They aren’t in our league, it’s tough to schedule them sometimes,” he said. “It’s not like we won’t be seeing them in volleyball, wrestling or at the county tourney for baseball and softball.

“Plus, if they make the playoffs, guess who they are going to most likely have to play in football? Us.”

Millington will finish their contract with Croswell-Lexington this fall in football and have agreed to play another close neighbor, southern school Otisville-LakeVille High School, starting in the fall of 2009 for four seasons.

But for the meantime, the two neighbors won’t be football rivals.

“We have no problem with Millington,” Gleeson said. “It’s been a long-time rivalry and it’s good and hopefully down the road, we will be able to play with them again.”