West Bend East, West Play Final Rivalry Game Before Merger Into One High School

WAUKESHA — Charter buses carrying alumni from the classes of 1988, 1992 and 2002 began lining up outside West Bend East High School at 4:40 p.m. Friday, more than two hours before kickoff of what both schools are calling the final meeting of a football rivalry that started in 1962.

West Bend East and West will merge into a single West Bend High School beginning with the 2027-28 school year under a consolidation plan the West Bend School District board approved earlier this year. Friday's homecoming game, East's athletic office confirmed, is the last one that will be played as a cross-town rivalry under the two separate names.

Ticket sales topped 2,980 by Thursday night, according to East's front office, with stadium staff adding a fourth folding-chair section along the north fence line to handle an expected crowd past 3,000. East athletic director Carl Pfannerstill said the school ordered 400 extra programs "just in case," and ran out of those by 6:15 p.m.

Both fight songs, one halftime

East band director Carol Niedermeier spent three weeks arranging a four-minute, twenty-second halftime medley splicing both schools' fight songs together, a first in the rivalry's history. Niedermeier, 54, said she wrote the transition eight separate times before settling on a key change she described as "the least jarring option available to me."

"It's nostalgia mixed with practical sadness," Niedermeier said. "You're trying to honor two 60-year traditions in under five minutes without anybody's grandmother crying in the stands. I don't think I succeeded on that second part."

West's band, by contrast, opted to play its own fight song straight through twice, a decision assistant band director Phil Rozek called "the dignified choice."

Alumni make the trip

Doug Petrakis, a 1992 East graduate who drove up from Sussex for the game, said he hadn't missed a homecoming since he graduated except for 2020. He arrived at 3 p.m. to claim the same bleacher section his family has occupied since his younger brother played in 1996.

"I've been coming to this game longer than some of these kids have been alive. Next year there's no East-West to come back to. There's just West Bend, playing somebody else."

— Doug Petrakis, East class of 1992

Petrakis said he bought a commemorative program for $7 and a second one "to keep in the truck," a habit he said he's maintained since 2004.

What happens to the rivalry trophy

The two schools have traded a wooden rivalry trophy, painted alternately East-gold and West-blue depending on the previous year's winner, since 1979. District administrators confirmed the trophy will be retired to a display case in the new consolidated school's main hallway regardless of Friday's outcome, a decision East senior Haley Dombrowski called "the right call, but still weird."

Dombrowski, a co-captain of East's dance team, said this year's homecoming committee debated for two meetings whether to crown a single homecoming court representing both schools or hold separate courts one final time. They went with separate courts, she said, "because somebody on the committee started crying at the first meeting and we didn't want to push it."

Parking, as always, a factor

East's lot, built for roughly 600 cars, filled by 5:50 p.m., prompting overflow parking along three residential streets and a brief standoff between a tow-truck driver and an alumnus who insisted his minivan had been parked in the same spot "since the Clinton administration." West Bend police stationed two extra officers at the lot's entrance to direct traffic, an assignment one officer described only as "busier than last year, less busy than it's going to be at the new school."

Kickoff was scheduled for 7 p.m. Both schools' administrations declined to say which fight song will be taught to incoming freshmen next fall.