Decades Old Norristown-Upper Merion Thanksgiving Rivalry To Reignite

Norristown and Upper Merion high schools will again face each other in this fall’s Thanksgiving Day game, renewing one of the region’s oldest rivalries, school officials confirmed on Thursday.

The two schools faced each other for 35 straight years until 1989, when a huge fight occurred at the end of the game.

The rivalry is even more heated as it is tied dead even over three and a half decades. Norristown has 15 wins, Upper Merion has 15 wins, and there have been five ties.

And thirty years before that rivalry began, Norristown faced Bridgeport High School each year, which was eventually absorbed into Upper Merion.

In 1990, when it was announced that the tradition was going to end, Upper Merion officials said that it had nothing to do with the fight, but rather with increased enrollment rates at Norristown that made the game less competitive.

Norristown won the final match in 1989 by a final of 35-0.

The Norristown athletic director at the time, George Ortlip, eulogized the end of an era in an interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1990:

You’ve got to remember, it’s not just a game; it’s a tradition. All of our students in college come back for Homecoming and to see their friends. Most years we get large numbers of people who are there just to see a good football game. There have been years we should have won going away, and we either tied or lost the game, and years they should have won, but we rose to the occasion. It was the kind of game where all the records to that point went out the door before kickoff.