Dustin Shoaf keeps a new trophy on the desk in his office. It arrived this summer, before his Southmoreland Scotties had ever played the team it's named for. "Our goal is to play the game for the next 100 years," Shoaf said of the rivalry he and Connellsville coach Jace McClean invented from nothing.
The two schools call it the Battle of 119. They played the first one on August 28, the Week Zero opener, at Connellsville. It was, by the county's own sports outlets, a thriller, close enough that Connellsville had to hold off a determined Southmoreland team to leave with the win. What makes the story worth telling isn't the score. It's that Southmoreland and Connellsville had never played each other before this year, despite sitting 11 miles apart on either side of the county line, one team in Class 3A, the other in 5A. Nothing about the matchup was required. Two coaches decided it should exist, and now it does.
A Rivalry Doesn't Need History. It Needs Two Coaches Who Agree
That's the part of Westmoreland County football that doesn't show up in a season preview. The county's rivalry games aren't relics handed down from some earlier era of high school sports. Some of them are manufactured on purpose, in real time, by people who noticed a gap and decided to fill it. Shoaf had already seen the model work in another sport: Southmoreland and Yough have run a wrestling series for years under its own trophy name. Football, in his read, was missing the same thing. So this year it got one.
That's a different story than the one most county football writing tells, which treats rivalry as inheritance, something a town is simply born into. Watch a season up close and the truth is closer to the opposite. Proximity creates the possibility. Two coaches with a shared sense of what their programs need turn possibility into a fixture. The Battle of 119 exists because Shoaf and McClean built it, not because Southmoreland and Connellsville were always going to play.
The Older Rivalries Prove the Same Point, Just on a Longer Clock
The county's two other named trophy games show what the Battle of 119 might look like in twenty years, and both confirm that even long-running rivalries have gaps in them.
- Riot on the Ridge, Derry Area vs. Ligonier Valley, alternates between Weller Field in Ligonier and Trojan Stadium in Derry. The rivalry sat dormant for 67 years before the two programs revived it in 2022, when Ligonier Valley won the reopening game 51-7. It's been close to an annual coin flip since. The two coaches, Roger Beitel at Ligonier Valley and Mike Arone at Derry, have traded wins in the seasons since, and neither program treats the other's win streaks as settled.
- The Battle for the Victory Bell, Penn-Trafford vs. Gateway, is played for an actual bell that sits on the track at Gateway's Antimarino Stadium during the game. It's the one true legacy rivalry of the three, a fixture of the WPIAL's Big East Conference slate long enough that neither program remembers a season without it.
Two of the three named rivalries in this county went missing for decades before someone brought them back. That's worth sitting with if you think of Friday night football here as unbroken tradition. It isn't. It's maintained, deliberately, by people who keep choosing to renew it.
What This Fall's Calendar Actually Does
Strip away the trophy names and the county's bigger story this season is a scheduling collision. Four programs, Latrobe, Norwin, Hempfield, and Penn-Trafford, cross paths with each other inside a six-week stretch that starts before most residents have put away the pool floats.
Latrobe opened its season August 28 against Derry and travels to Norwin next, on September 4, the same week Hempfield hosts Penn-Trafford at home. Norwin's own non-section slate runs through Penn-Trafford, Latrobe, and Franklin Regional before its Class 6A section play opens September 18 on the road at Pittsburgh Central Catholic, a stretch that builds toward an October 30 home date against North Allegheny, a rematch of last year's WPIAL semifinal, according to a season preview from PA Today. Hempfield, meanwhile, hosts Canon-McMillan on September 25 before traveling to Latrobe on October 23.
Read that as a whole and the county's football map for September and October isn't a set of isolated Friday nights. It's a loop. Latrobe plays Norwin, then eventually plays Hempfield. Norwin and Hempfield are both working through the same block of Class 6A section opponents. Penn-Trafford shows up on more than one of these teams' schedules within the same two weeks, first against Norwin on August 28 and then at Hempfield on September 4. If you live near any one of these four programs, odds are decent you'll recognize half the names on an opponent's roster by Halloween, because your town's team already played them, or is about to.
September 18 Will Do Two Things at Once
The same night Norwin opens section play across the county at Pittsburgh Central Catholic, Greensburg Salem will host Southmoreland at Offutt Field and pause the game to honor its 1989 and 1990 Keystone Conference championship teams. Two time signatures will be running at once on the same Friday: one program will be three weeks removed from launching a rivalry that didn't exist a month earlier, and another will be stopping the clock to recognize a team that hasn't taken the field in over 35 years.
That's the texture that a bare schedule can't show you. Westmoreland County football isn't one era. It's several running in parallel, and September 18 happens to be the night three of them intersect.
Why This Matters if You Live Here
None of this is really about wins and losses. It's about what the county is choosing to build and preserve at the same time. Southmoreland didn't just start a new rivalry this year, it added a new building next to Russ Grimm Field at Southmoreland Stadium, part of a wider energy-efficient renovation of school and athletic facilities that includes a new locker room for girls sports with 25 lockers and showers, two additional public restrooms, added storage, and a facelift to the gym floor and bleachers. A program doesn't pour that kind of investment into a stadium unless it plans on filling it for a long time. The new trophy and the new building went up the same year, and that's not a coincidence so much as a pattern. Towns here don't wait for tradition to accumulate on its own. They build the infrastructure for it, physical and competitive, on purpose.
If you already live here, that's probably not news so much as confirmation of something you've felt on a Friday in the stands without naming it. If you're weighing whether Westmoreland County is the kind of place where a Friday night sticks, the answer is in how many of its towns are actively building one this season, not coasting on an old one.
If Friday nights like these are part of what already makes this county feel like home, or part of what's pulling you toward it, the LaBoonSmith Group knows these towns well enough to help you find a seat close to the action. Schedule a free consultation whenever you're ready to talk about which Westmoreland neighborhood fits the life you're actually trying to build here.
