Fox River Bell Returns Oct. 2 As North, South Meet In Same Conference For First Time Since 2016

WAUKESHA — Waukesha North and Waukesha South will play for the Fox River Bell on Oct. 2, marking the first time since the two schools rejoined the same athletic conference in August that a game between them will count toward a conference standings table, rather than the informal nonconference scheduling arrangement the athletic departments maintained on their own for the previous decade.

The date itself moved twice. Both athletic departments had penciled in a "late September" window back when the Parkland Conference realignment was finalized, but the master schedule that emerged from July's WIAA paperwork initially placed the football game and a North-South varsity volleyball rematch on the same night, Sept. 25, a collision South Athletic Director Patricia Gensemer said she did not catch until a booster parent emailed both schools' front offices within eleven minutes of each other asking which gym or field their family should be driving to.

"We had one night with two crosstown rivalry games and one family car," Gensemer said. "That's not a schedule. That's a hostage situation."

One Calendar, Two Sports, Several Overlapping Relatives

South volleyball coach Maria Santos said untangling the conflict required what she called "a complete schedule recalibration" involving six phone calls, a shared spreadsheet, and one afternoon in which she and North's volleyball coach independently proposed moving the same date to the same alternate Tuesday without telling each other first. The volleyball match was ultimately moved to Sept. 29, clearing Oct. 2 for football alone.

"Ten years ago this wasn't a problem because the two schools weren't on the same calendar at all," Santos said. "Now we're on the same calendar, which is good, except it turns out that's exactly when you find out how many families have one kid on North's team and another on South's."

"We had one night with two crosstown rivalry games and one family car. That's not a schedule. That's a hostage situation."

— Patricia Gensemer, athletic director, Waukesha South

Gensemer's office has since fielded four additional scheduling questions from parents with children enrolled at both schools through a district open-enrollment provision, including one household with a South senior on the football roster and a North sophomore on junior varsity volleyball, who confirmed the family now owns a second folding cooler specifically to avoid coordinating who takes the original one.

4-0 Meets Whatever North Currently Is

South enters the game the only unbeaten football team left in the conference at 4-0, a start the town has by most accounts not handled gracefully. North, at 2-3 after a rebuilding non-conference slate that included the Aug. 21 opener against Milwaukee Lutheran, is 0-1 so far against Parkland Conference opponents since realignment took effect.

North head coach Rick Domagalski declined to characterize the Oct. 2 game as a measuring-stick opportunity against a ranked crosstown opponent, saying only that his team has spent the week on "situational stuff," which he did not elaborate on. Asked directly whether he considers South's 4-0 start intimidating, Domagalski said, "I consider it Friday," which South coach Randy Oberbrunner, informed of the quote by a reporter, called "a very Domagalski thing to say" and declined to respond to further.

Oberbrunner said his team has treated the week like any other on the schedule, "with the minor exception that half my roster grew up two blocks from half of their roster," a dynamic he said produces more trash talk in the school hallways than it does on the practice field, since several players on both rosters share a travel baseball team in the spring and, per Oberbrunner, "would still carpool to that if you asked them to right now."

The Bell Itself

The Fox River Bell, the cowbell-style trophy awarded to the winner of the North-South game since 1987, was recovered from a district storage closet in August after sitting untouched since the schools' last meeting in 2016. It has since been repainted, reweighted with a replacement clapper after the original went missing sometime during the Obama administration, and, per the merged conference handbook finalized in August, is now the only cowbell-style noisemaker permitted in the stands for any Parkland Conference football game, a carve-out both athletic departments agreed to after weeks of separate debate over general cowbell policy.

Gensemer said the bell will be presented on the winning sideline immediately after the final whistle, "assuming nobody drops it, which has happened before, and which is a separate story I am not going to get into right now."

Kickoff is set for 7 p.m. at South's home field. Both athletic departments have confirmed there is no shared-parent volleyball conflict scheduled for that night.