The annual Island Cup football rivalry between Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket is set to return this weekend, a year after it was cancelled for only the second time in its long history.
Legendary Nantucket football coach Vito Capizzo, who led the Whalers in decades of Island Cup rivalry games against the Vineyard, died May 17. He was 78.
An inspired Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School football team ended its season with a victory last Friday night, taking a bit of the sting out of a season cut short.
Faced with injuries and disciplinary dismissals, the regional high school decided Thursday to forfeit the end of the varsity football season, including the Island Cup.
Robert Tankard is calling it quits after eight years as head coach of the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School football team.
News of his resignation, following a 27-14 loss to Nantucket Saturday, came as a shock to his players, football fans and the high school athletic department.
Personal victories are what Bob Tankard cares about. He relies on them, he says, because they are messages that validate life and each person’s place on earth. Bob Tankard is the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School football coach.
He’s got the winner’s attitude and it just won’t quit.
When Bob Tankard says “I have a firm belief” or when he says “I mean it, I really mean it,” he clenches black hands into tight fists and squeezes his dark, merry eyes shut. His face forms a solid, peaceful expression.
In what referees, coaches and spectators agreed was one of the dirtiest football games seen here in a long time, Nantucket High School toppled Martha’s Vineyard 27-14 Saturday.
Referees kept warm in the wind-chilled weather by walking off more than two football fields worth of penalties between the arch rivals who fought physically and verbally from the opening whistle to the final tick of the clock.
The record shows that in 1953, an informal team of Vineyarders played football against Nantucket High School, losing 33-20. A rematch the next year yielded a scoreless tie.
Five years later, in 1959, Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School opened its doors, bringing together under one roof the ninth, 10th, 11th and 12th-graders from all six Island towns. This school consolidation enabled the Island to field an interscholastic football team for the first time, and official competition against Nantucket High School began in 1960.
