"That ax is going to find its way back home right here to Bearcat Nation," Sherman Mayor Shawn Teamann told a courtyard full of students on August 24, four days before kickoff.
He was wrong. On August 28, the Denison Yellow Jackets beat the Sherman Bearcats 50-19 in the 128th Battle of the Ax, keeping the trophy in Denison for a second straight year. If you live in Grayson County, none of that is news. You already know the score, you already have an opinion about the new coaches, and you've probably already argued about the drumline competition. What's worth pausing on is something the game itself makes obvious once you look at the calendar: this is a non-district game. It has no bearing on either team's playoff position. And it is still the hardest ticket, the biggest civic mobilization, and the most engraved piece of metal in either city's history. The Battle of the Ax isn't important despite counting for nothing in the standings. It's important because it counts for nothing, which is exactly what leaves room for everything else.
A Game That Decides Nothing and Sells Out Anyway
Sherman and Denison have been meeting on the football field since 1901, with only a handful of years skipped along the way, and the two schools have opened their season against each other for as long as anyone currently coaching can remember. That means the Battle of the Ax happens before district play begins, before either team has a single game that affects a playoff seed. By the numbers that actually govern a season, it's preseason.
None of that shows up in the demand. Munson Stadium's official capacity is listed at 6,500, but earlier tellings of the rivalry put attendance as high as 10,000 in years when fans found a way in regardless. This year, the Denison side of the stadium sold out by August 24, four days out, while tickets remained available only on the Sherman side. In 2019, the entire game sold out in under 13 minutes. A district championship game with actual stakes doesn't always draw like that. A meaningless non-district opener in Grayson County does, every year, on schedule.
Why the Rivalry Opens the Season Instead of Closing It
Most Texas football rivalries build toward November, when a win can decide who makes the playoffs. Sherman and Denison inverted that on purpose. Coaches on both sides have described the logic the same way for years: opening with your oldest rival, before the roster has been tested by anything else, is its own kind of pressure. One Denison coach once compared it to opening a season with Texas-OU weekend. There's nowhere to hide in week zero, and that's precisely why it works as a proving ground rather than a coronation.
This year brought two new head coaches into that structure at once. Efrain Ramos took over at Sherman, and Brian Lilly returned to Denison, back in the town where he was born and raised, this time calling plays instead of playing them. Both were handed the hardest possible debut: a sold-out rivalry game with 125 years of history behind it, before either man had coached a single down that would count toward a playoff spot.
What Fills a Week That Doesn't Count
Because the Battle of the Ax carries no competitive stakes, the space around it has filled with something else: the two cities' actual civic infrastructure. This year that included:
- A Sherman ISD pep rally on August 24 in the high school courtyard, where the mayor spoke and seniors described the week as more anticipation than they'd felt for any other game on the schedule.
- A Battle of the Ax Canned Food Drive, run by Sherman ISD from August 21 to 28, with a dollar-for-five-cans conversion, benefiting MasterKey Ministries, a local food assistance nonprofit. Sherman High School's Student Council collected donations at noon on the 28th, hours before kickoff.
- A Denison Parks and Recreation tailgate at Forest Park, open to fans of both teams regardless of whether they had a stadium ticket, with vendors, inflatables, throwing and kicking competitions, and an obstacle course for kids, adults, and alumni alike.
- A new addition this year: a drumline competition between the Sherman ISD and Denison ISD bands, staged immediately after the team entrances, added specifically for fans who couldn't get into the stadium.
- A clear-bag policy at Munson Stadium, limiting bags to see-through construction no larger than 12 by 6 by 12 inches, or a small clutch under 4.5 by 6 by 6.5 inches, with no alcohol permitted at the school-district-run tailgate.
None of that is athletic department business. It's a food bank drive, a parks department event, and a mayor giving remarks, organized around a game that will not appear in either team's playoff resume. That's the tell. When a game doesn't count competitively, what fills the vacuum is the county deciding to show up for each other anyway.
One Ax, Engraved Every Year Since 1949
The trophy itself is a physical ledger of the rivalry, and it's stranger than a plaque. In 1949, Denison businessman and ice cream shop owner Jack Barker donated an actual axe, meant as a gesture toward good sportsmanship between the two towns rather than the ill will the name might suggest. Sherman won it first that year, 13 to 7. Every game since has been engraved onto the blade, and a local trophy shop, Awards Unlimited, has handled the engraving since sometime in the early 1980s. Once a blade fills up, the team with the better overall record keeps the original axe.
Even the record book disagrees with itself, depending on when you start counting. Sources tracking the series from its first meeting in 1901, which included forfeits and multiple games in a single season, put the all-time record at 68 wins for Sherman against 43 or 47 losses, with eight ties, depending on which year's tally you're reading. A separate accounting that starts in 1906, the year both schools formally recognized the rivalry as an annual game, has Sherman ahead by a narrower and entirely different margin: 57 wins to Denison's 32, with six ties. Neither number is wrong. They're measuring different eras of the same argument, which is a fitting way for a 125-year-old rivalry to keep score.
If you want to see the artifacts rather than just read the tallies, the Sherman Ex-Students Museum keeps photos and yearbooks from decades of these games. Its director has been attending Battle of the Ax games since 1967 and has made the point that the rivalry, once genuinely divisive between the two towns, now functions as something closer to a shared civic occasion.
This Year's Result, and What It Actually Settles
Denison's 50-19 win keeps the axe in Denison for a second consecutive year. That continues a pattern that's been mostly one-sided this decade: Denison held the trophy for 11 straight years before Sherman finally broke the streak in 2024. Sherman held it for exactly one season before Denison took it back in 2025 and has now defended it again in 2026.
What the result does not do is tell you anything about how either team's actual season will go. Because the game falls outside district play, Sherman and Denison now head into separate district schedules with the Battle of the Ax question closed for the year and their real playoff push still ahead of them, undecided by anything that happened at Munson Stadium in August.
The Calendar Peaks Before the Season Starts
That's the part worth sitting with if you live in Grayson County and have never mapped it out. The single loudest, most attended, most civically organized night of the Sherman-Denison fall calendar happens before either team has played a game that counts toward a playoff. Everything competitively meaningful, district standings, postseason seeding, comes later and draws less noise. The county has arranged its own calendar so that the emotional peak and the competitive stakes never land on the same night. Whatever your teams do this fall, the loudest night already happened, and it happened in week zero, on purpose, exactly like it has for 125 years.
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