Nick BrazzoniIt’s a cold October night at Mount Horeb High School. Temperatures are dropping near freezing for the first time in many months, and the opposing students from Sauk Prairie High School are celebrating the cold by singing a variety of Christmas carols you could hear from across the field. There’s a slight breeze, but nothing too overwhelming as the smell of hot chocolate and hot dogs fill the fall air. The bleachers rattle from the consistent stomping of feet from the fans; some doing it to cheer on their team, others doing it to simply stay warm.
Senior Drew Archie is number 41. He lines up on the defensive line as not only the leader of the defense, but also as the captain of the team. As team captain, he serves as a leader both on and off the field, but there is something different about Archie. It’s not a thing you’d be able to notice watching Archie play, as he’s no bigger or smaller than most of his teammates. However, Archie does differ from his teammates in the sense that he doesn’t have the luxury of going to a larger school or a school with its own football field and facilities.
Archie doesn’t even have the luxury of wearing his own school’s colors when he lines up on defense. But if you ask the senior captain about it, he would tell you that he wouldn’t want it any other way.
“I’ve seen all the upperclassmen wear the Viking jerseys in school and it was just the thing to do,” Archie says. “I didn’t have any negative feelings about it at all.”
Archie attends Barneveld High School, which has an enrollment of just over 100 students. At this time, the school does not have a large enough student enrollment and interest to field a successful football team of its own, and it hasn’t for more than two decades. For this reason, 25 years ago, Barneveld and Mount Horeb formed a co-op, allowing Barneveld students who wanted to play football to have that opportunity at Mount Horeb.
Head coach Travis Rohrer has taken the program to new heights since his very first day on the job, as he has lead the team to the playoffs in every year he’s been at the helm. Photo by Thomas Yonash.
And while there may be a divide while the students are attending classes at their respective schools, as soon as they step on the football field, they are united under the Mount Horeb/Barneveld name.
“We all roll as one,” Archie says. “There’s no split.”
In a state where schools located in larger, suburban cities have traditionally dominated in football, there are still small schools in smaller cities statewide fighting to keep football as an activity open to their students. Barneveld is one of those schools, and with the help of the Mount Horeb football program, students at both high schools have been able to play the sport they love despite Barneveld’s low enrollment numbers.
Jeff Wright is currently the junior varsity coach for the Mount Horeb/Barneveld football program. He was born and raised in Barneveld, and he played football there when the school was still able to field their own team. His senior year — during the fall of 1989 — was the final year Barneveld had its own program, and the co-op with Mount Horeb began the very next year.
During Wright’s junior season, Barneveld won just one game: It was against Monroe High School’s sophomore team — essentially the same as a varsity team playing a junior varsity team — and they only won by one touchdown. His senior season was more of the same, as the team walked away with a single win on its record.
“When we took the field, it wasn’t one of those deals where you’re going, ‘Alright, we’re gonna go out and win tonight,’” Wright says. “It was, ‘We’re gonna go out and make sure we’re not gonna get killed tonight.’”
Changes had to be made, as according to Wright, having to pit so many freshmen against much bigger varsity teams was starting to become dangerous. So the Mount Horeb/Barneveld co-op began the very next year. Twenty-five years later, the relationship still exists and the sense of community between the two schools continues to grow.
However, despite the long history of the co-op, for the majority of its existence, those involved in the program were still reluctant to call the program what it was: Mount Horeb/Barneveld football.
“You’re always gonna have naysayers on it no matter what,” Wright says. “You have naysayers within the Barneveld community with whatever sport you have.”
To those naysayers, it was always Mount Horeb football. That’s what a majority of the newspapers said, that’s what the jersey colors said and it’s even what the scoreboard said. At least that’s what it said until current head coach Travis Rohrer arrived at the school just over seven years ago.
Rohrer has been coaching since 1993, when he was an 18-year-old assistant at Edgewood High School while attending Edgewood College. From there, he went on to be a defensive coordinator at both McFarland High School and Watertown High School for a combined eight years. When the coaching job opened up at Mount Horeb/Barneveld, Rohrer felt he was ready to take the next step.
Rohrer was hired as the head coach for Mount Horeb/Barneveld in 2008. Before he had his initial interview, he was completely unaware that the program was a co-op because it was so commonly referred to as Mount Horeb football. He only found out when a friend and fellow coach filled him in on the situation before his interview, leading him to do some research of his own.
When Rohrer was interviewing for the job and they asked him what he planned to do to build the relationship with Barneveld, the future head coach’s proposed solution was simple.
“The number one thing is that it’s not just going to be Mount Horeb football,” Rohrer says. “It’s going to be Mount Horeb/Barneveld football. MHB football. Whether it’s a T-shirt, whether it’s in the paper, whether we go to an away game and someone puts Mount Horeb on the scoreboard, we’re gonna tell them it’s Mount Horeb/Barneveld.”
But it didn’t stop there for Rohrer. For the head coach, the relationship between the two schools went far beyond the name and far beyond football. He was going to do everything he could to build it into one community.
“When I first got there, I made it a point to go to the youth football games. I attended their banquets,” Rohrer says. “I went to basketball games, baseball games.
“It required a lot of time and a lot of driving … but we wanted to make sure that Barneveld students and families felt like they were as much part of the deal as possible, so they’re not feeling like the red-headed stepchild.”
That sense of community Rohrer has brought to both cities is best exemplified in how the head coach interacts with the local families and friends after the games. Rohrer says that from the start, he was welcomed by the community with open arms simply because they had never really seen the head coach around before. Following the team’s 49-28 win over Sauk Prairie this year, Rohrer couldn’t take 10 steps without being stopped by a parent or student sporting Mount Horeb’s red and white.
“Nice game, coach,” one student says in passing.
“Good job, coach,” another says exuberantly as Rohrer gives her a hug.
Rohrer’s natural leadership allowed him to instill a culture in the Mount Horeb/Barneveld football program that’s rooted in family. There may be disagreements and times of adversity, but, in the end, it’s about sustaining the bond that has made the program so strong.
But strong may be an understatement, as the team has been in the quarterfinals of the state playoffs each of the past three years, reaching the semifinals in one of those seasons. Before Rohrer arrived at the school, the program had never won a playoff game. Now, Mount Horeb/Barneveld has won a playoff game in each season under Rohrer and his staff.
The Mount Horeb/Barneveld football team currently consists of 111 students, 13 of which come from Barneveld. Photo by Thomas Yonash.
Moving forward, there are always concerns about the potential separation of the two programs, mainly because the co-op must be approved and renewed every two years by the schools, the Badger Conference and the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association. Every time that two-year agreement expires, people grow concerned that Mount Horeb will want to leave Barneveld because they affect the program’s enrollment and resulting division placement.
However, the ongoing sense of community growing between the two schools is why neither Wright nor Rohrer believe the co-op will come to an end any time soon, despite the fact that Mount Horeb could stand on its own as a Division III school and talk from those on the outside looking in saying that a co-op will never work.
Because despite all of this, the strength of the Mount Horeb and Barneveld co-op comes from the tradition of a relationship that has lasted 25 years. That tradition of partnership is exactly why the schools plan to stay together for many years to come.
“It’s not a co-op out of necessity,” Rohrer says. “It’s because of tradition.”
On the surface, it’s no different. Rohrer and his team run a read-option offense through senior quarterback Max Meylor that works efficiently and effectively, wearing down their opponents with their fast-paced play. There are no gimmicks or outlandish strategies. It’s football.
It’s when you look beyond football that you see why the sport is so important to the Mount Horeb and Barneveld communities. Sure, wins are nice, but for these people, family reigns supreme: a family that sits under one roof created by two cities, two schools, two communities.
“It’s like a marriage,” Wright says. “You’re going to have good days, you’re going to have bad days. But the ones that are involved directly in the program … the continuity and the sense of family has grown. There’s no Mount Horeb, there’s no Barneveld. It’s Mount Horeb/Barneveld.”
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/233321350″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=false&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”450″ iframe=”true” /]