Rivals
The cross-town Bears of Merced High School have been the Cougars' rivals since Golden Valley opened in 1994.
Merced has a deep and long-standing animosity with the Atwater High School Falcons, both in sports and in academics. As the city of Merced grew, so did its student population, forcing the freshmen to be bussed to a different area of the city known as "East Campus" in order to adequately fit them all. This eventually drove the city to develop plans for a second city high school, Golden Valley High. Until the new school's opening, the main rival for the Merced Bears was the Atwater Falcons.
However, the opening of Golden Valley prompted a split in districting of Merced and nearly half of the first-year students at the new campus were from Merced High. Since then a great competition between "old school" and "new school" (quite literally) has sprung up and Atwater has fallen into a close second-rival for both city schools.
Read more about this topic: Golden Valley High School (Merced)
Famous quotes containing the word rivals:
“What poet would not grieve to see
His brother write as well as he?
But rather than they should excel,
He’d wish his rivals all in Hell.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)