The Ursuline faithful want to get back the traveling shillelagh.

By ELISE McKEOWN SKOLNICK

VINDICATOR CORRESPONDENT

YOUNGSTOWN — “Let’s go Irish! Let’s go Irish!”

Students, staff, parents and alumni of Ursuline High School packed the school’s gymnasium Thursday and chanted the mantra over and over. For more than an hour and a half, cheerleaders jumped, the band played, and members of the senior class performed skits.

It was all an effort to boost spirits for a momentous football game that marks 50 years since the first time Ursuline played rival Cardinal Mooney.

The teams first played each other in 1958 and began the tradition of passing back and forth a shillelagh, a club associated with Irish folklore.

Mooney has taken home the trophy for the past six years — as they did in 1958.

That first game was close at 8-6, though, said Dick DeBacco, a member of the 1958 Ursuline team and a 1959 graduate.

A senior that year, DeBacco didn’t have a chance to come back and beat Mooney. Now he’s counting on the 2008 team to do that.

“The 1958 team is here because we need to get even,” he said to wild cheers from the crowd. “So please don’t let us down.”

Members of that team have traveled from as far away as Florida, Tennessee, Maryland and Texas — racking up a combined total of 18,000 miles — to be present for this year’s game. They, and members of the 1958 cheerleading squad, received a standing ovation as they were introduced.

The shillelagh is Irish, noted Father Kenneth Miller, a pastor at Ursuline, and was donated to Ursuline by an Irish woman.

“‘It’s our shillelagh and we’re going to get it here,” he said. “And [Mooney] won’t see it for many years.”

The members of the 1958 team were his idols, said another Ursuline graduate, Ed O’Neill. Best known for his successful stint as Al Bundy on television’s “Married with Children,” O’Neill is a 1964 graduate and former football player.

He played on the last undefeated Ursuline team, O’Neill noted.

“Maybe this year you’re going to be undefeated, too,” he said.

Currently, the fighting Irish have a perfect 8–0 record.

“These rallies are great,” O’Neill concluded. “But I don’t think [the players] need to be pumped up too much. They know what to do.”