[01/28/02]Starting Tuesday, the St. Aloysius Flashes will get a chance to prove that they’re the best small school team in Mississippi.

They’ll have to keep waiting for a chance to prove they’re the best team in Warren County, however.

Vicksburg Warren athletic director Lum Wright Jr., who has the final say on schedules for Vicksburg High and Warren

Central, said he wouldn’t schedule St. Al any time soon.

“I don’t see any purpose in a 1A school playing a 5A school in certain sports,” Wright said. “We have no obligations to play them. We’re not in a district with them or anything.”

The teams haven’t played since a foul-filled game between St. Al and VHS in 1999 that resulted in four suspensions three of them to St. Al players. That game, a 4-3 VHS win, led to Wright’s decision to stop scheduling soccer games between St. Al and the two larger county schools.

St. Al competes against Class 1A, 2A and 3A schools in the state playoffs. VHS and WC are in Class 5A.

“If you’ve got a problem between schools, then not playing them is a good solution, whether it’s a money-making game or not,” WC coach Jay Harrison said, adding that he couldn’t recall any problems in games between WC and St. Al as either a player or coach.

St. Al coach Shirley Agostinelli said she understood Wright’s decision, but felt it was time to resume the rivalries.

“This time the adults need to act like the children did and let it go. I think there’s some hard feelings and maybe they’re afraid somebody will get hurt, but how many times have you seen Vicksburg and Warren Central players in our stands? And our players support them just as much … You have to put it behind you,” Agostinelli said. “There’s no hard feelings, no animosity. By that weekend, it was over.”

Although the Flashes and Gators have patched things up and players on all sides would like the rivalries to resume there are other reasons why they won’t.

As Wright indicated, VHS and WC would stand to gain little from the games, other than larger-than-usual gate receipts. St. Al, meanwhile, would make a name for itself by merely hanging in against the larger schools, win or lose.

“I can see it. We’re a 5A school. We’ve got more to lose playing a school like that, and they’ve got only positives to gain,” VHS coach Josh Harper said.

Harrison said that a game between WC and St. Al would probably be competitive, but he’d rather fill that spot on the schedule with a team the Vikings might face in the playoffs.

“We only have a certain number of teams that we can play, and we try to play teams that we’re going to see in the playoffs,” Harrison said. “They have their agenda and we have our agenda that we have to follow as far as getting ready for the playoffs and playing 5A teams.”

St. Al players, however, feel there’s another reason why they can’t find a place on the Vikings’ and Gators’ schedules the larger schools are ducking them.

Harrison and Harper both denied the charge and praised St. Al’s squad, but the Flashes still feel they need to beat one of Warren County’s 5A schools to gain respect.

The last time St. Al played Warren Central was in 1998, when the Vikings beat the Flashes 10-0. Many of St. Al’s players were in eighth or ninth grade when that game was played, and the Flashes have emerged as one of the top teams in Class 1A since then.

St. Al is 27-4-1 over the last two seasons a record that includes victories over several 5A schools and Class 4A power Florence and the Flashes will play another 5A team, No. 7 Northwest Rankin, on Jan. 24.

“It feels like as soon as we got old enough and good enough, we’re not allowed to play them anymore,” St. Al’s Greg Smith said.

Many players on each team are either related to players on other teams, friends with each other or play on the same select teams or summer leagues, which makes for a lot of trash talk among them.

“The Warren Central players talk all the time about how they’d beat us. We want to prove to them that we’re the best team in the county,” Smith said.

Getting good enough might just land St. Al a game against their county rivals, however. Agostinelli entered the Flashes in the Northwest Rankin Tournament in December with the hope that they’d meet the Gators somewhere along the line.

It never happened the teams were placed on opposite sides of the bracket but it could be a way to get them together in the future.

“As many tournaments as there are, there are plenty of opportunities for us to play,” Harper said.

There are also other ways for the teams to play, although it wouldn’t have the luster or the hype of a regular-season game.

Vicksburg senior Kiger Sigh, who played in the infamous 1999 game, said some of the Gators and Flashes had talked about getting together for a friendly game after the season is over.

“We want to play them,” Sigh said. “They’re our friends, but they’re our rivals. We respect them, but we want to beat them.”

St. Al goalkeeper Andy Gough welcomed any challenge the Gators or Vikings wanted to lay down, whether it was sanctioned by the MHSAA or just played on one of the Bovina fields on some sunny Sunday afternoon for nothing more than pride and bragging rights.

“Any field, any time, we’ll play them,” Gough said.