Schedules for Section III’s upcoming high school football season are out and feature a high-profile area meeting of state playoff participants during the opening weekend.
Syracuse’s Christian Brothers Academy Brothers, winners of 28 consecutive games and back-to-back Class AA sectional and state championships, will travel to Chiz Frye Field Sept. 5 to meet Class A Whitesboro to start the season.
Whitesboro is Section III’s two-time defending Class A champion and has won 25 of its last 27 games, with the only losses coming in state championship games. The first of Whitesboro’s five home games kicks off at 6:30 p.m. on the Friday evening of the first week of school.
Christian Brothers Academy beat Whitesboro twice in 2021, the Brothers’ final Class A season before moving up to AA. The Brothers were 34-18 opening-weekend winners at home that year and won 20-12 at Whitesboro in the quarterfinals of its march to a sectional title and eventual state finals appearance.
The Brothers’ 2021 season ended with the second of the program’s four state championships, a 32-31 victory over Section I Somers, the team that has beaten Whitesboro the last two years and won all three Class A championships since Christian Brothers Academy moved up in class.
This season’s opening weekend also reunites Utica’s Proctor Raiders and Rome Free Academy’s Black Knights in league play. Proctor was a 28-14 non-league winner at home last fall and beat the Black Knights 52-14 in Utica in 2022 before the teams went without a head-to-head matchup in 2023.
Proctor travels to Rome for the first time since beating the Black Knights 52-18 in the fall of 2021, and the Raiders have not lost a game between the schools since 2014.
With a single Class AA league in Section III this fall, Christian Brothers Academy will visit Oneida County three times. The Brothers play at Proctor Oct. 4 and Rome’s RFA Stadium the following Friday.
Whitesboro plays at East Syracuse-Minoa, the 2023 sectional runner-up, Sept. 26. Whitesboro beat East Syracuse-Minoa twice in 2023 and defeated the Spartans 62-8 at home last season. Whitesboro and Corcoran, last fall’s runner-up, are not scheduled to meet this fall; a 20-point win at Corcoran was Whitesboro’s closest game during the regular season.
Championship rematches
The opening weekend of the season includes two rematches from the 2024 Section III finals: Class A Indian River plays at New Hartford, and eight-player champion Frankfort-Schuyler heads to Morrisville-Eaton.
A third rematch sends Mt. Markham to Dolgeville in Class D in October.
New Hartford and Indian River have played thrilling championship games the last two seasons. Indian River won 34-26 in overtime last fall after tying the score with a touchdown and two-point conversion in the fourth quarter. In 2023, Indian River scored a touchdown and won 28-27 with a two-point conversion in the final minute of regulation.
Those two games were the teams’ first since Indian River last made the trip to New Hartford in 2016.
Frankfort-Schuyler beat Morrisville-Eaton twice on its way to a state championship last fall; the Maroon Knights’ 50-14 win in the sectional final was payback for Morrisville-Eaton’s 30-28 victory in the 2022 title game.
Between those two games, Frankfort-Schuyler also won the 2023 sectional crown by beating West Canada Valley. The Maroon Knights enter 2024 with wins in 22 of their last 23 games.
Dolgeville has won each of Section III’s four Class D championships since high school football returned to the fall in 2021 after COVID restrictions were lifted; the last two titles have come in wins against Mt. Markham, a team the Blue Devils have beaten six times in three seasons since the Mustangs departed Class C.
Dolgeville won last year’s title game 49-8 following a 30-22 victory that concluded a 7-0 regular season three weeks earlier. The Blue Devils won the 2023 championship game 32-14. Dolgeville also defeated Mt. Markham 28-8 in the 2022 semifinals prior to beating Beaver River in that title game.
This article originally appeared on Times Telegram: 2024 state finalists square off in Week 1 highlight of area high school football schedule
Reporting by Jon Rathbun, Herkimer Times Telegram / Times Telegram
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
