COLONY — Some things are bigger than rivalries.
While players, coaches and their respective fan bases set up on opposite sides of the field for Friday’s football showdown between Marmaton Valley and Crest high schools, they shared the field in a show of unity during a special postgame ceremony.
Their message was to promote mental health awareness and suicide prevention.
Many in the audience donned yellow T-shirts with the message “Stay: The world needs you in it.”
The rally was a joint effort between the schools’ FFA chapters, with Marmaton Valley and Crest splitting the proceeds of the T-shirt sales.
Organizers had hoped to sell up to 100 shirts. It took a few days to eclipse that number.
By kickoff, more than 300 shirts were sold, with additional orders still coming in.
“It’s really great for two schools to put aside their differences,” noted Marmaton Valley senior Sophia Heim, who helped come up with the idea for the shirt sales.
She noted both schools have dealt with suicide recently.
Heim said she was sitting with friends at lunch recently and heard that the schools’ football coaches, Crest’s Nick McAnulty and Marmaton Valley’s Max Mickunas, had already floated the idea of their teams wearing yellow socks to denote the color widely recognized for mental health awareness.
“I thought, why can’t we do something similar?” Heim said.
She asked her advisors, Jacque Gabbert and MaKayla Stroud, who in turn reached out to Crest’s FFA instructor Zac Edgerton about the possibility of a joint project.
Administrators from both schools answered with an emphatic yes.
“You have two rival schools, and over the years it’s been a friendly rivalry, and there were times when it’s not so friendly,” Crest Principal Travis Hermreck noted. “It’s had everything. But something like this shows what small towns are made of. When things are tough, we are in this together.”
The event culminated with both sides gathering at midfield, many arm-in-arm, for a prayer led by Marmaton Valley history instructor Mike McEwan.
“It became a really great event,” Mickunas agreed. “It was meaningful to everyone involved. Hopefully we can use our platform, whatever it is, to try to send the message that people are important.”
