“The history of these two clubs goes back to the beginning,” said coach Nick Lauterbach of his Cincinnati Wolfhounds and Columbus.

The battle for Ohio, of which the first half of the 2010/2011 version will be played Saturday, has been one-sided in recent years. When Columbus (AKA Scioto Valley) moved back up to DI last season, Cincy beat them in both Midwest-East meetings.

“We’re hoping to restore the rivalry. They’ve kind of dominated Columbus I guess for the last few years, so we’re hoping to obviously try and make that right,” said Columbus coach Paul Holmes.

“And off our bad loss at Detroit, it should be a much better performance. We traveled to Detroit without a lot of starters, so it should be a much better weekend.”

Columbus was pounded 50-12 by the Tradesmen in their league opener in August. That lopsided result won’t trick Cincinnati into thinking they have an easy game ahead of them.  

“I don’t base previous games from other scores, because I don’t know their personnel,” said Lauterbach. “I don’t know how well they travel, other issues they may have. Someone could be getting married that week or they just had a bad week, so it’s really hard to judge from looking at the scores of other games.”
That’s a wise approach according to Holmes.

“We traveled to Detroit without a lot of starters, so it should be a much better weekend,” said the Columbus coach. “Without a shadow we’re better than that.”
The battle for Ohio will be a classic matchup of forwards versus backs.

“Forwards. You take the forwards out the game, they don’t really have much,” said Holmes.

“I would imagine they like to move the ball around,” said Lauterbach. “At least, that’s what we’ve seen in the past. I’m sure that they probably haven’t moved too far away from that. We’re pretty familiar with them and they’re obviously pretty familiar with us.”