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The College Rivalry: Competition Goes Beyond the Wagon Wheel
The College Rivalry
COMPETITION GOES BEYOND THE WAGON WHEEL
The Kent State and Akron University contention spans decades, but it inspires healthy competition
WORDS BY Collin Cunningham
ILLUSTRATION BY Sophia DelCapio
As legend has it, University of Akron founder John R. Buchtel set out in the spring of 1870 to establish another college in the town of Kent. While traveling by horse-drawn wagon across leagues of muddy fields, Buchtel’s carriage became entrenched in the earth, causing the wheel to break off.
After construction, employees uncovered the wheel while working on a Western Reserve Trail pipeline in 1902. It found its way into the hands of Raymond E. Manchester, the Kent State Dean of Men at the time. Manchester wasn’t sure if the wooden hoop he’d been given
was actually Buchtel’s, but he made the most of the situation. In 1945, he declared the wheel a trophy to be given to the winner of the annual Kent versus Akron football game.
Like that, a rivalry was born, though Manchester never could have imagined how a football game between Kent and Akron might look today. The excited fans, wearing “Beat Akron” T-shirts, holding signs urging on their favorite teams, both of which confusingly sport extremely similar colors.
“It’s part of what college, just being in college, is all about,” Kent State Director of
Athletics Joel Nielsen explains. Nielsen started in his position in 2010.
Five years ago, Nielsen collaborated with Tom Wistrcill, the former director of athletics for Akron, to create the Wagon Wheel Challenge, an athletics comparison system that scores the 14 different men’s and women’s sports that play against each other.
“I think it’s just been a great rivalry,” George Van Horne, the University of Akron’s senior associate athletics director says. He also explains the origin of the wagon wheel.
“We’re two of 130 schools playing in the
football bowl subdivision, so we work closely with our counterparts at Kent State because we have a lot of similarities.”
Van Horne has been with Akron’s program since 1994, when he was a student baseball player himself. He’s watched the program grow and reshape itself in the years since, and he thinks the rivalry between Akron and Kent inspires a healthy sense of competition.
“There are things that we can share,” Van Horne says. “There’s not many people in the community who work in college sports at our level, and we’re close.”
The universities are only 15 miles apart, and this fact, combined with the similar size of the schools, leaves Kent and Akron with little reason not to work together. That goes beyond athletics. Like a big blue and gold blanket, the rivalry envelops almost every aspect of student life.
“We compete with Akron on a number of different levels, everything from recruiting students to our campus to the corporations and businesses that we all deal with in the community,” Nielsen says.
Colleges are businesses, and anyone who’s spent enough time in Northeast Ohio will admit that neither university is afraid to throw all kinds of advertisements in your face, usually boasting about academics.
“It spills over into other areas, but students make decisions about where they want to pursue academics, where they feel that it’s the best fit for them,” says Wayne Hill, Akron’s vice president of University Communications and Marketing.
This brings up another aspect of the rivalry: Kent and Akron are constantly compared on the quality of their major programs. Kent’s School of Fashion Design and Merchandising ranks as the third best for merchandising and the fourth best for design in the country. Akron’s College of Engineering has been around for more than a century and is home to one of the oldest traditional co-op programs in the United States.
A school’s success in academics is often measured by its retention rates. Kent tends to hang on to 82 percent of its students after
– JOEL NIELSEN, KENT STATE DIRECTOR OF ATHLETICS
their freshman year, while Akron manages to keep 73 percent of its students after their first-year.
Calil Cage is the president of the Kent State Integrated Greek Council, a member of Phi Beta Sigma and a junior majoring in business. He first heard about the rivalry at a Kent versus Akron football game during his freshman year.
“Growing up, the rivalry has always been looked at as a good thing, like sibling rivalry,” Cage says. “You look at your siblings and there’s obviously clear-cut aggression, but overall, we’re really close. Kent and Akron are about 30 minutes away from each other and the students, we get to know each other through different things, through sports, through social activities and organizations linking from campus to campus.”
Cage works with members of his fraternity in Akron to plan community service events.
In this way, playful opposition can be good because it inspires improvement on the behalf of all parties. Each school wants to look better, and if they want to attract future students they have to try and offer superior studies and resources to the other.
“It sparks an energy on both campuses, though we’ve had a lot of cooperation as well,” Hill explains. “In the last couple years, through social media efforts, we’ve had some good fun with our mascots. It’s a healthy, fun rivalry.”
Just in time for Valentine’s Day 2017, Kent and Akron released a pair of videos that explains an alternative origin story for the rivalry. There’s a scene where Kent’s mascot, Flash the Golden Eagle, is shown exchanging a Valentine with Zippy the Kangaroo, Akron’s costumed caricature, and the two skip away. Another part hilariously features the two playing a whipped cream prank on a person wearing an Ohio State hoodie.
These social media novelties are a cute way to get people motivated to support their school, but there are some students who attend Kent and Akron who don’t know much about it.
“The first thing I think of is ‘what rivalry?’” University of Akron resident assistant Tyler Gaydosh says. “The only thing that I ever really hear about it is the poking fun, the easy jokes.”
Gaydosh first heard of the rivalry when he was touring Akron as a senior in high school, when one of the tour guides cracked a joke, asking, “Hey, can someone give me the time?” When someone gave him the answer, the guide replied with “And Kent State still sucks!”
The way Gaydosh puts it, the rivalry is almost nonexistent in all but name, though it does serve to highlight some of the differences between the schools.
“Akron does feel busier, because the campus is a block away from downtown,” Gaydosh says. “One of our buildings in downtown Akron, you have to cross bridges to get there. You get more of a campus life in Kent.”
Existing in a city as compared to a more suburban town means that Akron students have a drastically different college experience than people who attend Kent, leading them to have different ideas and impressions of what attending a university is like.
“I also applied to Akron, [and] choosing colleges as a freshman, it was the people, it was the feelings of home for me,” Cage says. “Even when it comes to concerts, people don’t go to Akron for concerts, they come to Kent for concerts. But when you look at the party scene, everyone in Kent goes to Akron for parties rather than Kent.”
Van Horne says, differing mindsets in combination with the rivalry can mean all the difference in post-graduation life.
“I think the thing is now, when you look at it, a lot of the households in this area are split,” Van Horne says. “A Kent grad and an Akron grad might be married to each other, so you’ve got that in-house rivalry in the family, where you might be betting who does the laundry this week, or you’re gonna have a little dinner bet going on the game.”
The consensus seems that everyone has a different take on the rivalry, depending on where they’re from, what kind of environment they prefer and, of course, which school they attend. Regardless of which side you root for, if you stand behind one at all, you know about the rivalry. It’s everywhere.
“We take, very seriously, involving students in our entire athletic department, and the rivalry is the epitome of that, and so I think it deals with a great sense of student pride and pride in the university,” Nielsen says. “I think it permeates throughout the student body and our fans, that rivalries are great for a lot of different reasons.”
COLLIN CUNNINGHAM | ccunni19@kent.edu