By: Nereida Dominguez Remedios

“The St. Paul Central vs. Highland Park football rivalry known as the ‘musket game’, is one of the oldest and most storied high school football matchups in St. Paul. This rivalry began in 1964 and has been a staple of the local sports scene ever since.” – Greatamericanrivalry.com

On February 11, 2025 Highland Park played Central at Highland Park Senior High School. Since the start of the game, more students from both schools came in and both student sections started to get more packed.

During the second half, Central’s student section started to chant for the Highland student section. One of the chants Highland was doing was “Overrated”, where they were yelling at the Central section 3 times. In response, the Central kids were yelling at the Highland section “We can’t hear you”. After that, it was just a war on who was louder. Even though there weren’t as many students from Central, there were still lots of arguments happening.

During the game, Central’s cheerleaders, who weren’t supposed to cheer, still came without uniforms to cheer against the Highland cheerleaders.

During halftime, the Highland cheerleaders had a show even though not a lot of the students stayed to watch them. I did watch it though and it was amazing. The cheers were high energy and you could tell the cheerleaders were passionate with what they were doing.

Even though Highland lost by 9, the final score was 67-76, the Highland players put up a good fight to try to win the game, but Central still won. Next year, we will play them again and hopefully win.

Within the game, Central’s players were a lot more aggressive and pushed the Highland players; the Central players were throwing the Highland players to the floor. Within the game, Highland had 9 fouls and Central had 7 fouls.