PERRYSBURG — Nowadays, when Perrysburg defeats Anthony Wayne in any sport for a Northern Lakes League title, or vice versa, the players on either team are quoted saying something like, “It’s huge to beat our rival.”

It helps that until the NLL added four schools this year, Perrysburg and AW were becoming the biggest schools in enrollment in the conference, plus add on that Maumee left for the Northern Buckeye Conference.

As a result, the Ding Dong Bell football trophy that Perrysburg and Maumee played for 60-plus years has become moot because the two schools don’t schedule each other anymore for league games.

Bring on the “Battle for the Maumee” trophy, created by Perrysburg Schools technology education teacher Jeff Smith, a longtime assistant coach at Perrysburg.

For the first time Friday night, the two-foot high, 100-pound trophy went to the winner of the AW-Perrysburg football game at Steinecker Stadium.

“When we retired the (Ding Dong Bell), as a former high school player (at Collins Western Reserve) and a former high school football coach at Perrysburg, I felt that we had the need to replace it with something, so that is how the idea came about,” Smith said.

“I had a former student who donated some old barn wood from a local barn that was being torn down. That’s where we essentially got the lumber from.

“I started building it, I went up and looked at some of the cannons looking over the Maumee, and got the idea, but the athletic director and assistant AD wanted me to scale it way down so it wasn’t so heavy or bulky to get it back and forth between schools, because the winner gets a trophy and they take it back to their school until the next game.

“Then I got the STEM and physics teacher (Nate Ash) involved and asked him if he wanted to make any signs or anything like that for it, or help out because he had a CMT machine over in the STEM lab.

“We made a nice sign for it, we built the cannon in the wood shop — the cannon itself is just turned with wood, we stained it black and the rest of the cannon has just several urethane coats.”

Smith, who coached under former Perrysburg coaches Ray Pohlman, Roger Frank and Matt Kregel, got his students involved, too, sanding, gluing, and cutting the axles of the cannon. It is entirely a Perrysburg creation, although AW was aware of the project and gave it their full blessing.

“Two people can pick it up. It’s not real big,” Smith said. “They wanted me to scale it down because the old Victory Bell was on a big, heavy cart that had a trailer.

“They just wanted to scale it down, put it on the back of a pickup — it’s like a little tank or a little wagon, maybe.”

Smith says there are still naysayers who don’t like seeing the history being Perrysburg and Maumee sent into a deep freeze.

“I was looking at some of the Facebook posts and people are angry,” Smith said. “Some people didn’t even know that Anthony Wayne is the new rival, and other people are saying you can’t replace Maumee, there is just no way, so not everybody is happy to be on board with that.”

Don’t take it too hardly because the Ding Dong Bell trophy may not be going away, just used for other sports. The two schools are scheduling each other in basketball and baseball for example.

Plus there are plans for Maumee and Perrysburg to play non-league in football — they have already contracted for several years away, taking the first open date the two schools could find.

“We always had the bell with Maumee, and that’s something we’ve talked about the history of, that it may rotate sports, so there is a possibility it may be boys basketball this year or it could be girls basketball, or it could be baseball,” Perrysburg long time baseball coach Dave Hall said.

Hall believes the AW-Perrysburg rivalry has some of the same attributes as the Maumee-Perrysburg rivalry did.

“With the new rivalry, I think both schools, as competitive as the two schools are and we are sharing the Maumee River with Anthony Wayne, and that is going to be our rival, as far as I’m concerned for baseball,” Hall said.

“I’m not going to say anything about Maumee because our games for the last 15 years have been very competitive with Maumee for baseball, but it’s us or Anthony Wayne it seems like almost every year for the league title.

“So I think that has evolved and with football being the last game, I think it’s just really nice to be playing for something.”

Ding Dong Bell

The Ding Dong Bell has a history dating back decades, even centuries, beyond the beginnings of the Maumee-Perrysburg football rivalry.

According to the Maumee school district’s website, the legend goes, “The bell was first used at Fort Meigs in 1813 to summon troops and as an alarm. One night, Chief Little Turtle heard the bell tolling and reportedly remarked, ‘White man make um ding dong.’

“During the summer of 1816, the War Department determined that Fort Meigs was no longer important and Fort Miamis would become the area’s major stronghold.

“So the bell, of course, had to be relocated across the river. The dugout canoe carrying the bell was tipped by a strong gust of wind partway through the journey, and the bell was lost.

“In 1959, Colonel Smedlap Effingtass of Maumee’s Old Plantation Inn heard the story and decided the bell must be recovered. Divers using metal detectors searched the river for weeks and were ultimately successful.

“The bell was mounted on wheels and awarded to Maumee High School on November 11, 1960 after victory in the big game. Now, every autumn, Maumee and Perrysburg battle for possession of the Ding Dong.”

The two schools first began playing each other in 1917 with Maumee winning 46-0, and Maumee also won the first game for the bell, 16-14, after Perrysburg had just won three straight.

Win streaks more than three games were rare in the series, with the winners often celebrating deep into the night in their hometown business districts.

“There were times when we would win the bell and the coaches would let us parade it,” Smith said. “Even as a coach, I appreciated the fact they’d let us off the bus and we’d parade that thing through downtown.

“That was exciting, and that’s what this new (cannon) is to create memories. That’s why I’m doing it. It’s not about me.

“Everyone is asking me, ‘Hey, did you sign this cannon or put your name on it?’ No, it’s not about me. It’s creating memories and letting the kids know you have to have a trophy of some sort.”

On at least two occasions, in its early years and in the late 1980s, the bell was claimed to be stolen from Maumee by Perrysburg students, who soon after had to deal with police.

In the 1970s, Maumee was the biggest school in the NLL. But as Perrysburg grew and Maumee could not because of urban landlock, Perrysburg was dominating football games toward the end.

Perrysburg leads the series, 58-40 with five ties, but since 2012 Perrysburg has won every game except one.

Smith recalls one year during its heyday where Perrysburg appeared to be heading to the playoffs and were unbeaten in the NLL, and Maumee was struggling to get wins, but as the cliché goes, that doesn’t matter in a rivalry.

“We were up 22-0 at halftime and they came back and beat us,” Smith said. “I don’t know how that happened, but it did, and it knocked us out of the playoffs.”