It made too much sense for old small-school rivals Fort Hill and Dunbar to do battle once more, and for the first time ever, they’ll meet in the regular season.
Fort Hill will head down to Baltimore to take on Dunbar in Week 2 next season at Morgan State University. The Poets will make the return trip to Greenway Avenue Stadium in 2025.
The two powerhouse programs are 77-1 over the last three seasons, with Fort Hill capturing the last three Class 1A state championships and Dunbar winning three straight Class 2A/1A titles.
Assuming each squad takes care of business in Week 1, the winner will also hold the longest winning streak in the state of Maryland. Dunbar enters 2024 having won a state-best 37 games in a row. Fort Hill is second at 21 straight.
As with every new opponent, Fort Hill head coach Zack Alkire and his staff met with the players before making anything official. Did they want to play Dunbar? The answer was a resounding yes.
“We sat down and we talked to our kids about the prospect of playing them,” Alkire said. “We reached out to Dunbar the last couple years, and they reached out this year. The kids are really excited about it.”
Fort Hill and Dunbar have met six times previously, five in the state championship game and once in the semifinals.
Dunbar holds a 5-1 edge, with the lone Fort Hill win coming in the 1997 Class 2A title game when star back Josh Page and coach Mike Calhoun led the Sentinels to a 22-6 victory — the most lopsided game in the series.
The last three meetings have all been by one score.
The most recent battle was in the 2017 final in Annapolis, a 30-26 Poets win. Dunbar won in the 2010 semifinal in Baltimore 20-14, which will stand as the only non-championship meeting until next fall’s game.
The two waged a noteworthy battle in 2008, when future All-American at West Virginia University and first-round NFL draft pick Tavon Austin scored a two-point conversion to give Dunbar a 20-19 victory over upset-minded Fort Hill for the 1A title.
Alkire was on the staff for every Dunbar game since 2008. Week 2 next year will be his first as the head coach.
“With the old playoff system, it came down a lot of years to Fort Hill or Dunbar,” he said. “One year a semifinal game. Seems to be that we’re the two most consistent schools over the past decade-and-a-half.
“It’s really exciting that the two most consistent teams in the two lower classes get to play each other.”
Dunbar won the first meeting in the series in 1994, 30-15 in Hagerstown in the 2A championship game. It marked the first time a Baltimore school had won a state football championship, something that’s commonplace now.
That game was played before what the Baltimore Sun called: “10,000 crimson-clad, banner-carrying Fort Hill fans.”
Both teams are coming off undefeated state championship seasons.
Fort Hill ended the 2023 season with a 45-21 rout of Mountain Ridge in the Class 1A title game. Jabril Daniels rushed for 301 yards — the second most in title game history — and five touchdowns.
Daniels, originally from Baltimore, will be making a homecoming in Week 2 a year after setting the Fort Hill single-season touchdown record with 34 scores as a junior.
Fort Hill, which finished 13-0 last year, has won eight of the last 10 Class 1A state championships.
Dunbar, meanwhile, outlasted Calvert, 8-0, to capture its 13th state championship, passing Seneca Valley and Damascus for the most in MPSSAA history.
The Poets (11-0) were led by first-year head coach Michael Carter Sr., who served the previous six years as an assistant for longtime coach Lawrence Smith.
It was a far from normal championship season from Dunbar.
The Poets’ first two games were ended early and weren’t completed. Their first — a contest with Loyola Blakefield that Dunbar trailed 21-0 late in the first half — was canceled after a 12-year-old boy was shot just outside the Poets’ stadium in East Baltimore.
Later that month, Smith was arrested by the FBI on charges of wire fraud, tax evasion and falsifying a tax return after he allegedly fraudulently obtained more than $215,000 in overtime pay.
Dunbar has not lost since Dec. 7, 2019, when Catoctin crushed the Poets, 31-8, in the Class 1A championship game. Catoctin routed Fort Hill, 41-0, the prior week in the semifinal round.
Fort Hill hasn’t shied away from beefing up its schedule in recent years.
The Maryland playoff system, which admits every MPSSAA member in all six classes, allows teams to schedule with no risk of missing the postseason.
Even so, the Sentinels haven’t lost to an out-of-conference foe since 2019 against Cathedral Prep.
Fort Hill went 2-0 versus Maryland Class 4A Old Mill (28-13, 9-7) and Class 3A Oakdale (42-7, 49-21) and beat Ohio Division 1 Wadsworth, 36-35, and Virginia 5A Briar Woods, 28-0, over the last three years.
“We have a really difficult time scheduling,” Alkire said. “Teams tell us no all the time, so when another small school that’s your size wants to play a game and you have an opening, it would be hypocritical of us to tell another team no when we get upset all the time with teams telling us no.
“We work with the premise that we can beat anybody. That may or may not be true some years, but we’re never going to go into a game thinking we don’t have the opportunity to win.
“There are teams out there we wouldn’t schedule like St. Frances, who reached out to us about playing a regular season game, because we won’t be able to compete with a team that nationally recruits.”
Alkire said the prospect of getting more eyeballs on his players to help with recruiting was also a factor in picking up Dunbar.
“One of our major goals is to get our kids to school and into college, and those kids that want to get to the next level need games against teams like Dunbar, Wadsworth and better quality schools to help out with that,” he said.
While Week 2 will mark the first time Fort Hill and Dunbar have met in the regular season, the Poets have squared off with the Sentinels’ city rival before the playoffs.
Allegany won a 49-42 thriller over Dunbar to open the 2017 season at Greenway Avenue Stadium, as Karson Robinette ran for 232 yards and scored two touchdowns, and Elisha Llewellyn ran for 151 yards and scored four times.
Fort Hill, which returns most of its production at skill positions but loses its entire offensive line, is hoping for a similar early-season result.