The Bishop Fenwick-St. Mary’s athletic rivalry has taken its share of twists and turns over the years, but it will be ramped up to an entirely new level today at noon at Tsongas Arena in Lowell.
That’s when the schools’ girls basketball teams will tap off against each other for the Division 3 state championship — the first time the two schools have met — on any sport — for all the marbles.
“We’ve had a great run of success and so have they,” said St. Mary’s coach/athletic director Jeff Newhall. “It seems like every year, it’s three games with them.”
One reason this has become possible is the change in the tournament from a sectional format to statewide.
“It used to be that we’d always meet in the first round, or — at the latest — the North final,” Newhall said. “But if you’re the two best teams, you should play for the championship.
Fenwick assistant athletic director Dave Woods agrees.
“It shouldn’t matter if you’re next-door neighbors (St. Mary’s is in Lynn; Fenwick in Peabody),” he said. “If you’re the two best, you should play.”
Of course, where these two schools are concerned, it doesn’t always matter when they play.
“It’s a great rivalry with a lot of good games in all sports,” Woods said. “Sometimes, it gets a little over the top, but what good is a rivalry if it doesn’t get heated once in a while.”
Woods, who is also the football coach at the school, has been a part of that intensity. Five years ago, St. Mary’s had won a tough game to clinch a spot in the state Super Bowl, but had several players get dinged up in the process.
The following Wednesday, St. Mary’s coach Sean Driscoll chose to hold some of the more banged-up players out of the Thanksgiving eve game between the two schools, and Fenwick ended up winning, 60-0. Afterward, the football rivalry was discontinued.
The Thanksgiving rivalry began in 1964, and, because Lynn Classical and Lynn English always played on Thanksgiving morning at the old Manning Bowl, the Fenwick-St. Mary’s game was always at Donaldson Field in Peabody – until 1985.
That’s when then-St. Mary’s coach Ray McDermott proposed the first Thanksgiving Eve Classic.
However, a cold rain forced postponement of that first-ever Thanksgiving Eve Classic until the following Saturday, which Fenwick won in overtime, 11-8, on a Pat Donnelly field goal.
Two years later, McDermott and the Spartans scored a major upset over the 9-1 Crusaders, 37-32 — in the first Thanksgiving Eve Classic actually played on the appointed date. The Spartans stopped Fenwick early in the game on a fourth-down play in Crusader territory, and David Brown — now the St. Mary’s boys basketball coach — followed with a touchdown reception to get St. Mary’s going.
“We had some good players,” said McDermott. “I don’t know how big an upset it was, though. They were 9-1, but we had some talent.
“That stuff, though — it turned the game around for us,” he said.
The win was St. Mary’s only victory over the Crusaders in a span that ran from 1979 to 1991 (save for a tie in 1980) — when the game was discontinued (it was resumed in 2006).
Today’s state championship game will be the culmination of years of big games between the two Catholic high schools. And while success in the rivalry is spread fairly evenly, it has lately been its fiercest between the girls basketball teams, which have matched up six times in the last nine years in the state tournament. The Spartans have won three in a row and four overall, including a 63-62 thriller in last year’s Div. 3 tournament.
In a 2022 bracket that included 38 teams, the Crusaders and Spartans were two of only four teams left standing for a memorable state semifinal game at Woburn High. With the clock winding down, and needing just a point to tie, Fenwick’s Olivia Found launched a deep 3-point attempt that, in the words of the late Celtics broadcaster Johnny Most, spun “around the rim and out.”
Two years prior to that (the 2021 season was lost due to COVID), the teams met in the Division 3 North semifinal, with St. Mary’s winning by 33. The 2019 state championship-winning Spartans won a one-point victory against Fenwick in the North semifinal (53-52), while a year earlier, in a game for the ages, in a North quarterfinal, Fenwick beat St. Mary’s in the Tony Conigliaro Gym, 56-52, coming from 10 points behind in the fourth quarter.
Fenwick coach Adam DeBaggis remembers it well.
“No one would have been picking us,” said DeBaggis, whose team was 11-9 coming into the tournament. “That was a huge win for us.”
The game, and its intensity, underscores both DeBaggis’ and Newhall’s belief that the state tournament’s new statewide format is much better than the sectional one.
“I know Jeff (Newhall) had a lot to do with it,” said DeBaggis, “and I thank him for that. We’d always have to meet in the North tournament, and sometimes in the early rounds. This is so much better.”
Of course, says DeBaggis, every year is different.
“This year, they beat us pretty good in both regular-season games,” he said. “They have more experience, and we’re young. But that can be good, too. We have nothing to lose.”
“Adam always seems to have his team together and ready to go by the tournament,” said Newhall. “It points to what a great program they have over there and what a great job he does.”
