As Thanksgiving Day high school football games fade away, two teams cling to an old rivalry

As his team warmed up before practice, West Philadelphia High School football coach Karl Patrick had a speaker set up next to the bumpy grass field on Monday, then had music blasted from it. He said he wanted “chaos.”

The field at 48th and Spruce Streets is expected to be ringed with thousands of noisy fans at 10 a.m. on Thursday, when the Speedboys face Overbrook High, their rivals, in the 32nd Turkey Bowl. The winners get to boast, “Who runs the West Side? We run the West Side!”

West Philly (7-4) is likely to beat Overbrook (2-5) for the fourth straight time and for the eighth time in the last 10 Turkey Bowls, but this is still one of those hard-fought rivalries in which anything can happen. Throw those records out the window, sports fans!

More important, something will happen on the field.

The Turkey Bowl is returning after a year off. This year, thankfully, the emphasis will be on football, not on neighborhood violence, as it was last year.

The 2022 game was canceled less than 24 hours before it was to be played, after four Overbrook students — two 15-year-old girls and two 16-year-old boys — were shot the day before Thanksgiving by someone in a passing car as they stood outside a beauty salon near the school. The students recovered.

It was the third time in five years that there was no Turkey Bowl. The 2020 game was canceled because of the coronavirus. The 2018 game was canceled after a brawl between students from West Philadelphia and Olney High Schools at an October game.

The recent cancellations are part of a broader decline; largely because of the advent of the statewide football playoffs in 1988, Thanksgiving Day high school football games in the region are fading away.

When the first Turkey Bowl was held between the Overbrook Panthers and the West Philly Speedboys in 1989, three years after I started as a sportswriter at The Inquirer, it was one of 34 “Thanksgiving Games” to be played that week in Philadelphia and the Pennsylvania suburbs. This year, there will be 16 such games.

I recently attended practice for both teams and spoke with coaches and players to get their takes on the renewal of this still-heated rivalry. At West Philly’s field and at Overbrook’s practice field, just 2.7 miles away, the chatter was all about football and the tough test ahead between the lines, not about the games lost to brawls, or COVID-19, or gunfire. And that is the way it should be, isn’t it?

I asked Patrick and Rendell Ivory, the Overbrook coach, about the recent cancellations and how they’ve worked hard to maintain the rivalry. They each said they would have played the 2022 game had it been up to them, but, as Patrick noted, the School District of Philadelphia made a “good call” in canceling the game out of an abundance of caution.

Patrick told me he’s all too familiar with neighborhood violence spilling onto the gridiron: He has coached two games that were interrupted by gunfire.

“There’s nothing worse than the fear of people ducking and running away from the field,” Patrick said.

Patrick’s son, Carlos Rivera, did not get a chance to play for the Speedboys in his final Turkey Bowl in 2020. Sean Nicolas, Overbrook’s senior quarterback, said, “I kind of felt bad for the seniors who didn’t get to play in the last game.”

Neither team had anything to do with last year’s shooting that canceled the game, coaches told me. And everyone was disappointed: The Turkey Bowl is a neighborhood holiday gathering place for alumni from both schools, so the fans were cheated, too. The game is hard-played, but the atmosphere is convivial. It is a reunion.

The game won’t be played on a smooth artificial turf surface, like many other Thanksgiving high school games in the suburbs. Players from both schools wear midnight green practice gear donated by the Eagles and distributed through a program called Leveling the Playing Field. The scoreboard at the field has been on the blink but is expected to be in working order.

This rivalry goes way back. These schools first tangled in a varsity football game in 1927, a year after Overbrook High opened. (West Philly won, 7-6.) They played other schools on Thanksgiving until 1989, when the Turkey Bowl was launched.

That first Turkey Bowl, played on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, was a 14-6 victory for the Speedboys. It was an auspicious start because Philadelphia was hit with 5 inches of snow later that day, leading to the postponement of all but four other Thanksgiving Day games in Philadelphia and the Pennsylvania suburbs.

The rivalry picked up some spice when the teams traded victories over the first seven years. West Philly then won eight of nine, but then the Panthers won seven Turkey Bowls in a row. The coaches contributed as players: Patrick at West Philly, Ivory at Overbrook.

“There is a lot of trash talk,” said Alem Mainor-Jettel, a senior captain and running back at Overbrook, “but at the end of the day, we all love football.”

Patrick and Ivory said they are confident that the scene Thursday will be safe and free of threats. Jabril Holmes, a hulking 6-foot-5, 315-pound senior tackle at West Philadelphia, expects the stands to fill early, with fans peering through the fence from the sidewalk on Spruce Street.

“It feels great that I’m going to be out there playing the sport that I love,” Holmes, who would have missed last year’s game because he was ill, told me with a smile.

Because only a handful of his players have appeared in one Turkey Bowl at the most, Ivory has shown his team video of past West Philly-Overbrook games in an effort to, as he said, “show them what kind of atmosphere they’ll be walking into.”

The prize, of course, is glory. “Whoever wins this game gets to brag about it for the whole year,” Ivory told me. “Until we play them again.”

Dave Caldwell lives in Manayunk and covered sports for The Inquirer from 1986 to 1995.