Wayne Hills carried a 4-0 record and a No. 16 state ranking into Old Tappan on September 25. The Patriots left with a 35-42 loss, their first blemish of the fall after wins over Northern Highlands, West Milford and Nutley. Two weeks later, on October 9 at 6:30 p.m., they travel across town to Wayne Valley for the game most people in Wayne already have circled on the calendar.
That crosstown matchup gets treated like it's always been the game. It hasn't. Wayne Hills and Wayne Valley only started meeting every year in 2009. Before that, in 39 years of separate schedules, the two programs crossed paths just three times, and only in the postseason. The rivalry everyone in town talks about is younger than most of the players suiting up for it.
Wayne Valley's actual oldest football rivalry runs against a team from a different town entirely, and it's been going since Harry Truman was in the White House.
A Rivalry Built Since 2009
Once Wayne Hills and Wayne Valley started facing off annually, the series filled in fast. Wayne Hills led the all-time count 11-2 through the 2017 season, a stretch that included a run few New Jersey programs can match: 55 straight wins between 2004 and 2009, the second-longest win streak in state football history, snapped only by a 17-15 loss to Saint Joseph Regional. That era produced Greg Olsen, a tight end on the Patriots' undefeated 2002 team who went on to a long NFL career. NJ.com ranked the Hills-Valley rivalry 24th on its 2017 list of the state's 31 fiercest high school football matchups, a notable placement for a series that was still less than a decade old at the time.
Wayne Valley has its own signature moment in that same window. In 2019, under longtime head coach Roger Kotlarz, the Indians beat Old Tappan 21-17 for a sectional title, ending a championship drought that stretched back to 1991. It was the kind of night that gives a program its own identity separate from whatever the team across town is doing.
None of that history is what makes Wayne Valley's football calendar unusual. That comes from a series most fans watching the Hills game on October 9 probably aren't thinking about at all.
The Older Rivalry Underneath It
Wayne Valley's longest-running football relationship isn't with Wayne Hills. It's with Passaic Valley, a series that has been played almost without interruption since 1952. The two programs sat it out in 1981, 1982 and 1983 because of conference realignment, and again in 2020 for reasons everyone remembers, but otherwise they've lined up against each other for more than seven decades. Their most recent meeting, in the fall of 2024, was the 70th game in the series, a 20-13 Wayne Valley win that pushed the Indians to 3-1 on the season.
Kotlarz described the current state of that rivalry after the 2024 win:
"In my 11 years here, I've never seen more buzz around this rivalry."
The series has swung hard toward Wayne Valley lately. The Indians have won 14 of the last 16 meetings against Passaic Valley, a level of dominance the newer Hills rivalry has never produced in either direction. Kotlarz credited Passaic Valley's own rebuilding effort for making recent games closer and more competitive than the lopsided record suggests.
Here's how the two rivalries stack up against each other:
| Wayne Hills vs. Wayne Valley | Wayne Valley vs. Passaic Valley | |
|---|---|---|
| First met | Three postseason games between 1970 and 2008 | 1952 |
| Became a yearly game | 2009 | Nearly every fall since 1952 |
| Series record | Hills leads 11-2 through 2017 | Valley has won 14 of the last 16 |
| Outside recognition | Ranked 24th on NJ.com's 2017 list of New Jersey's fiercest rivalries | Not on that list, despite being the older series |
Wayne Hills carries a long-running rivalry of its own outside town lines, too. Its series against Ramapo has been played for close to five decades and gets its own writeup on the program's website every fall, a reminder that Wayne's two high schools each have football histories that extend well past whatever happens between them on a given October Friday.
What This Means for the Rest of Fall
The two rivalries decide different things. Hills-Valley is the one that gets the ranking, the NJ.com list placement and the attention that comes with a program that once won 55 games in a row. Valley-Passaic Valley is the one that's actually been shaping Friday nights in this corner of Passaic County since before the interstate highway system existed, and it's currently the more one-sided of the two on the field.
Wayne Hills plays Lakeland Regional on October 2 before the trip to Wayne Valley on October 9. Wayne Valley's stadium sits at 551 Valley Road, a few miles from the Wayne Hills campus on Berdan Avenue, close enough that the drive between them takes less time than a quarter of football. Wayne Hills arrives at 4-1, still in position to control its own postseason path, looking to answer the Old Tappan loss on the same field where a much older football story in this town gets written every year against an opponent that isn't even on the schedule that week.
The scoreboard on October 9 will only settle one of the two rivalries that make a Wayne football fall what it is.
If you're heading to Wayne Valley on the 9th, you'll be standing in the same town Team Messercola has called home for years. Francesca and Louis keep their own scouting notes on which Friday night actually runs this town, and they're always glad to talk through it with a neighbor.
