Schools

OA or Canton High: Who is Stoughton High's Archrival?

Debating Stoughton High's archrival—is it based on history and tradition or current match-ups?

Asked to name archrival, SHS football captains Kevin Richard, Brandon Alves and Andrew Paredes answered in unison: Oliver Ames.

When asked the same question, girls’ basketball captains Chrystal Holland, Katherine Chlus and Jackie Kuhn replied with the same—the Tigers.

“It’s just a team we’ve wanted to go after all season,” Richard said.

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“It’s always a big game,” said Kuhn, a field hockey, basketball and softball player, of when Stoughton goes up against OA.

But then there’s Canton, which is centered around the annual , a tradition that dates back to 1926.

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Senior boys don’t dress up like girls and perform cheer routines at a pep rally and senior girls don’t play before games against Oliver Ames. These spirit week activities happen leading up to the

So does Stoughton’s rival don black and orange or green and white? Are they on the south side of Route 138 or the north?

“It just seems that over the past few years for a number of reasons, Oliver Ames High School has emerged as much of a rival and in some sports more [of a rival] than Canton,” Stoughton High Principal Matt Colantonio said.

“Absolutely it’s OA,” Boys Basketball Coach John Gallivan said of the school’s rival. “[But] that’s not to put a negative light on any other team in the league.”

Gallivan’s squads have had some classic meetings with the Tigers, with two of them coming this past season—a and a . From 2007-2009, the team’s met every year in the postseason tournament, with Stoughton winning two of those matchups.

While the games may not always be pretty, Gallivan said there hasn’t been a blowout in the series in his seven years as coach of the team.

“In basketball, there’s only game where the administration knows they have to work for crowd control,” Colantonio said.

And that game, of course, is against Oliver Ames.

“We mimic each other in so many ways,” Colantonio said of the OA-Stoughton rivalry. “Same school colors; the sports they're good at, we’re good at.”

But Colantonio said Stoughton “always will have a thing with Canton.”

“That history is still there, always will be,” he said.

Stoughton High Athletic Director Ryan Donahue wasn’t ready to anoint Oliver Ames as the school’s official rival, but said it’s a “great rivalry.”

“Both towns are notorious for hard work. [We] look forward to playing them each and every time,” he said of facing Oliver Ames.

Donahue said that there were “better matchups in certain sports” with Oliver Ames than with Canton, but couldn’t look past the “longstanding matchup with Canton.”

So whether Oliver Ames is on equal footing with Canton as Stoughton’s archrival, or the Tigers have supplanted the Bulldogs as chief foe, this much is clear: games against Oliver Ames are ones that get circled on the calendar, so to speak, by student-athletes, coaches and fans alike.

“[Oliver Ames] hits more of a nerve with our fan base,” Colantonio said. “The crowd is more amped up, as the kids would say, for an OA game.”

“We have so much tension [between the two schools],” Marcus Middleton, a football and basketball player, added. “The games are always so intense.”


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