A history of two decades of Champlain Valley Union High football

The football field was covered in water, and the rain was coming down in buckets.

The field had been planted with grass plugs, and the plugs had not really knit together completely to form a consistent layer of grass turf.

But the Champlain Valley Union High football community was anxious to play on its new field.

High school football official Phil Zalinger has memories of that first, and only, game at CVU in 2005.

The field was mostly mud, and when the players ran, their cleats would grab the grass nubs and kick them up. Zalinger said, “It was a bloody, awful mess.”

The rain was pouring down, and mud was everywhere, he said, and neither players nor officials could detour to avoid puddles as they ran up and down the field. Everywhere was a puddle.

CVU football was a new sport at the high school in Hinesburg. When the school decided to start a football team, it was required to begin as a club sport.

Today’s football coach Rahn Fleming was involved from the beginning, but he wasn’t coaching at the high school. He was coaching middle schoolers. A high school had to have a feeder program to develop young players before it could field a varsity team.

Although CVU varsity football started in 2005, club football started in 2003, and Fleming was coaching his sons, who were in middle school.

Nick Michaud gives a lot of the credit to himself and his older brother Justin for the starting of CVU football.

“We lived in Williston, and we begged and begged and begged our dad to start the program at CVU,” Nick Michaud said.

Both brothers were football players. Their father Jay Michaud coached fifth and sixth grade football for the Buccanneers in the Northern Vermont Youth Football League. He was an alum of Rice and suggested they could go to school there.

Nick and Justin didn’t want that. They wanted to go to CVU with their friends and play football there.

Eventually, Jay Michaud relented. He became the first head coach at Champlain Valley Union.

Nick Michaud has memories of the first game on CVU’s home turf — or home mud.

“I recall that game fondly,” Nick Michaud said, without a touch of sarcasm in his voice.

That first game on CVU’s home field was played on spirit weekend for the school.

“We played in a in a monsoon, more or less,” Michaud said. “I’ll never forget looking down at my feet, and the water was over my cleats.”

When the team sat down on the field to do stretches, they were all immediately soaked.

Nick Michaud said he was a fullback on a ground-and-pound, run-first football team and his first thought was: “This could be a great game.”

“We won 7-6. I can tell you all about that game. Adam Bart, the quarterback, threw a 21-yard touchdown pass to Nick Hamill, and that was the only score for us,” he said.

Mount Mansfield was CVU’s opponent for its inaugural home game. The Cougars also only scored one touchdown, but failed in a 2-point conversion attempt.

Nick Michaud said that win propelled CVU into the playoffs in their first year as a varsity team, playing in the now-defunct Division 4.

After the game, all of the CVU players took a chunk of mud from the field in a Styrofoam plate.

“I still have that mud, and it’s crusted, obviously, with some cobwebs on it,” Michaud said.

He also has fond memories of playing for CVU as a club team, particularly the last year. In 2004, CVU went 10-0, undefeated in the United States.

For those two years of 2003-4 as a club team, Champlain Valley was playing eight-man and 11-man football, depending on how many their opponents were playing.

“We were just trying to play games with anybody that was willing,” Nick Michaud said. When the team started in 2003, four of their players had played youth football. The rest of the team was “green.”

For the team’s final game in 2004, they traveled to Canada to play Owensville, Quebec, where they played by Canadian rules, which meant 12-man teams. CVU suffered its only loss in that final game of the season.

Since 2005, it’s been strictly 11-man football for CVU’s varsity football program.

Much of Fleming’s memories of CVU’s experience as a club team are of walking from the school to the fields, which were still basically the Ballards’ backyard on the west side of Route 116.

“We carried portable goal posts in a canvas bag,” Fleming said.

In 2009, Champlain Valley had another memorable game in the rain. Playing against Colchester at Essex in its first game in the Division 2 state finals, the rain was coming down so hard that Fleming still calls the game the “Essex Monsoon.”

Jim Provost, who was coach at CVU for seven years after coaching at Rice for 20, said it was a significant game for Champlain Valley, in its second year as a Division 2 team, in helping the school transition from a totally soccer-centric school to a school where football was also a viable option.

“We were leading at the half,” Provost said.

But with the rain torrential, Colchester started the second half with its kicker slipping on the soaked field, unintentionally booting an on-side kick that bounced off one of Provost’s players.

Colchester recovered, scored two plays later, and CVU lost 22-14.

In its 20th year of playing varsity football, Champlain Valley Union School has just finished an unparalleled season of gridiron success, not only going undefeated, but winning in dominating fashion. The Redhawks outscored its opponents in 11 games this year by a total of 393 points to 56.

And none of the games were played in the rain.