Cathleen Allison/Nevada Appeal
Mike Rippee has always known it would only be a matter of time before a season like this came around for Blair Roman.
"He's always been a football guy with a football mind and he comes from a football family," Rippee, the head coach of the Douglas football team said of the Carson High head coach last week. "In the right situation with the right players, I knew he'd be very successful."
Roman has directed the Senators to a 7-2 record overall in only his second season at the helm. And, more importantly, he has the No. 3-ranked Senators playing for a league title for the first time in quite some time.
In fact, from the onset of the season, it seemed that Carson and Douglas were on a collision course for what could be the best game in the region this season.
Both schools held up their end of the deal throughout the year and will play for the Sierra League title at 7 p.m. Thursday night at Carson High School.
It's a matchup Rippee said he, along with the entire Tiger football team, has been anticipating all year.
"It's worked out for coach Roman and Carson has had a great year," Rippee said. "I'm happy for him. It's one of those deals where there is no animosity between the two staffs. I wish him luck in every game except for the one we play against each other. I know how hard he works and how hard that whole staff works."
As well he should. The coaching staffs of the two schools, it would seem, have become inexorably linked.
Roman has been around Douglas football his entire life, literally.
When the Senators make the biennial trip down to Minden, it's Roman's father, Keith, that the Tigers' field is named after.
"Keith and I coached together for years and years," Rippee said. "When he finally retired, I was leading the charge to get that field named after him, because he did so much for this program."
Keith Roman was there long before Rippee came to the program, serving as an assistant during Douglas' only state championship season in 1974, and stayed on when Rippee took over as head coach heading into the 1985 season.
"I was introduced to Blair when he was just a little boy," Rippee said. "He used to travel on the bus with us to games."
As it turned out, Rippee's first year as a head coach was also Blair's first year on the Douglas varsity.
He won the starting job at quarterback and wound up playing in two close Carson-Douglas games - a 14-7 loss in Carson as a junior and a 19-7 loss in Minden as a senior.
"As a player, we had two really tough games and we lost both of them," Roman said. "Just the intensity of both of them was by far the most intense that I played in in high school. The physical play, the hitting, just the overall emotion of it doesn't compare."
His interaction with the rivalry, though, was only just beginning.
Bob Bateman, who had served on Rippee's staff for years, took on the head coaching job at Carson in 1993, and brought Roman on as an assistant the following year.
"Coach Bateman was instrumental in getting me hired as a teacher at Carson and I started coaching with him that year," Roman said. "I ended up sticking around for seven years."
At the time, the Carson-Douglas rivalry was right in the middle of its prime - an 11-season stretch between 1987 and 1997 where neither school won back-to-back matchups.
"Not only was it just an outstanding rivalry in terms of it being so even in terms of wins and losses, but the games during that stretch were so close every year," Roman said. "Once I was coaching, I think there was only one blowout (a 35-3 Douglas win in 1996) out of the bunch. Every other game was either a shootout or a defensive struggle. It was very entertaining football."
Roman left to become North Valleys' first head coach in 2000 and Bateman defected back to Douglas, where he was the defensive coordinator for the next seven seasons. During that time, he helped develop two of the best defenses in Douglas history (2003 and 2006).
"Bob and I go way back and we are very, very good friends," Rippee said.
In the meantime, Roman moved his family back to Carson in 2005 with the hopes of getting away from coaching for a while.
"I came back to Carson to teach and I stayed out of coaching for a year, but I missed it," Roman said. "Once a coach, always a coach. I came back and helped (former Carson coach) Shane (Quilling) for a year and then he decided to hang it up.
"It's interesting how things worked out. I had no idea I'd be back here, especially not as a head coach."
Around the same time, Bateman returned to Carson and was assumed the role of athletic director and defensive coordinator for the Senators.
Former Douglas defensive back Joe Girdner has been teaching at Carson High for quite a few years now and also served as the Senators' defensive backs coach in the past. This year, he is coaching the freshman team.
"It's weird, all of the connections we have," Roman said. "It just one of those things. I think it is probably a bigger deal to people on the outside than it is to us. I just talked to coach Rippee a couple weeks ago and honestly football didn't even come up.
"When I first started coaching, the first couple times I saw him on the other sideline, that took a while to get used to. But the bottom line is, and I'm sure he'd tell you the same thing, that once you get to that first kickoff, he really wants to beat our butts and we really want to beat theirs.
"It's a healthy, competitive rivalry. At the end of the day, it's not about who is coaching on the sidelines, it's about the kids on the field."
Indeed, Rippee did say the same thing.
"There's obviously a lot of entangling connections. I coached all Blair's brothers and Bob's kids," Rippee said. "There is no animosity between the staffs. We see each other at clinics and we hang out.
"I'm happy to see those guys doing well over there, but it doesn't take away from us wanting to have a great game and getting the kids prepared to do what they need to do."