The teams will still play but the longstanding decades-long date of the annual regular-season clash between the Washington-Liberty Generals and Yorktown Patriots will change this coming fall season for the neighborhood high-school football rivals.
For 54 years, the teams typically met in the final regular-season contests for both – on Friday nights, but sometimes on Thursday evenings and the last couple of seasons on Saturday afternoons.
The showdown drew enthusiastic crowds – some of the biggest for any sporting event between any Arlington public high-school teams.
It was an end-of-season clash both teams looked forward to, and often determined the county bragging rights, along with which public-school team would win the unofficial Arlington County championship. Yorktown most often defeated W-L to earn both honors.
Not including the shortened COVID season when the teams met in week three, the rivals played in week 10 for 19 straight years, including Yorktown’s 27-0 win this past fall.
This coming season, the schedule has been changed. Washington-Liberty and Yorktown will play much earlier in week four on Thursday night, Sept. 14 at 7 p.m. on the Patriots’ home field. Yorktown’s final regular season game will be against Herndon in Arlington on Friday, Nov. 3. Washington-Liberty will play the Wakefield Warriors, its other Arlington rival, in its final game Nov. 3.
Yorktown and Wakefield meet in week three of the 2023 season. Washington-Liberty last defeated Yorktown in 2016.
“For us, that final game against W-L was always a big deal, because we won it so often, and we will miss it being played then,” Yorktown coach Bruce Hanson said. “On the other hand, W-L might be happy about the move.”
Hanson was correct.
“It has been a minute since we have beaten Yorktown in that final game, so I don’t mind the change. It’s probably a good thing,” Washington-Liberty coach Josh Shapiro said. “I don’t see that hurting us. It will probably take away from the rivalry a little bit. But maybe there won’t be that same single-game focus and crazy atmosphere there has been in recent seasons.”
The last two seasons the game was switched from Friday nights to Saturday afternoons in attempt to have smaller and less animated crowds. That was an effort to calm and eliminate some of that crazy atmosphere, especially from the student sections. Both stands, mainly those student sections, emptied onto the field following the 2021 Friday-night game at W-L. That incident caused concern.
Neither Hanson nor Shapiro knew the exact reason for the schedule change. Shapiro speculated the switch is an attempt to calm the final-game atmosphere of past meetings.
Mike Krulfeld, Yorktown’s director of student activities, said there was no request made to the football schedule-making committee, like in the past, to specifically play the all-Arlington contest on that traditional game-10 date for the 2023 season.
Washington-Liberty (then named Washington-Lee) and Yorktown began their regular game-10 meetings in 1968. From that year on, the teams met in the final week of the regular season 48 times through the 2022 contest.
Back in 1977 and 1978 the teams met in the opening game of those seasons. In 1980, they were back to playing in game 10 on a regular basis except for a few years.
