NOTEBOOK: Spring-Ford a win away from milestone

By Don Seeley
dseeley@pottsmerc.com

ROYERSFORD — When Royersford and Spring City high schools’ Thanksgiving Day rivalry ended in 1954, the football feud didn’t.

Spring-Ford coach  Chad Brubaker

Even the late Norm Reichenbach, who guided the Spring City program for a couple of seasons prior to the merger that formed Spring-Ford and was named the Rams’ first coach, couldn’t believe how competitive his new team was … and that was throughout the first couple weeks of practice, against one another.
“It was still Royersford against Spring City for a lot of the guys,” Reichenbach recalled during an interview back in 1979. “It took a little while for some of them to realize they were now on the same team.”
The Eagles and Pirates had won a lot of games, combined to win 15 league titles. So fans from both sides of the Schuylkill envisioned even more success when they first teamed up together in 1955.
It didn’t happen, not at first.
The Rams strung together four winning seasons, and two of them (1959 and 1962) looked like championship runs before late-season losses cost them Ches-Mont League titles.
It wasn’t until 1969, when third-year coach Merle Bainbridge guided the Rams to the first of three Ches-Mont championships.
And even though the Spring-Ford program would move into the Pioneer Athletic Conference in 1986, win six outright titles and share another, it wasn’t until last week — for the first time in over a decade — the program got back to even.

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