By Bob Sutton
Special to The Alamance News
Football teams from Cummings and Williams didn’t play each other the past two seasons.
They’ll waste no time getting after it in 2025.
The Burlington city schools will meet in an August 22 game at Cummings to open the season. It will be a conference game as the teams are among the eight teams in a new league configuration beginning with the 2025-26 school year.
Schools made several arrangements for non-conference opponents as the North Carolina High School Athletic Association was sorting out conference memberships throughout the winter in the new eight-classification set-up. Initial conference drafts didn’t have Cummings and Williams in the same league, but that changed by the final version.
It also put the schools in a larger conference than expected, meaning a reduction in non-conference games. Schools had to sort out available dates, and it left Cummings and Williams sticking with the planned opening date for their game even though it’s a conference matchup.
Cummings coach David Grimm said this was a reasonable solution given the moving parts regarding scheduling.
The schools had planned to move a non-conference meeting away from the opening week of the season so school would be in session when they met. But after jumbled scheduling prior to the 2023 season and more changes coming for the next school year, Williams coach Patrick Stokes said setting the game for the first week of the season seemed to be the safest way to keep it on the schedule had they not become conference opponents.
“We’re not going to leave it up to the state (North Carolina High School Athletic Association) to decide,” Stokes said of the reasoning. “We’re going to decide.”
Both schools were able to fill open dates in what would have been the conference portion of their schedules with non-league games.
Stokes said he hated that two groups of players from both schools didn’t have a chance to participate as seniors in the storied rivalry.
Mike Pennington, commissioner of the new conference, said Cummings and Williams are locked into the opening game for 2026 as well.
Citing schedule conflicts when the Mid-Carolina Conference, which included Cummings, expanded to nine teams for the 2023 and 2024 seasons, the Cavaliers and Bulldogs didn’t meet. Cummings last won the 2022 opener at Burlington Memorial Stadium on the Williams campus.
