The day is bright but brisk — the kind of clear, hard sunshine that belongs to late autumn in the Four States. The air has a crisp edge, not enough to bite, but enough to make you tug the hoodie strings just a little tighter. The sky is a polished blue dome over Pittsburg, Kansas, and the leaves, half-fallen, skip along the brick walks in small, erratic dances.
We parked near the edge of campus, where the warehouses and workshops hint at the city’s industrial ancestry. The walk to the stadium took us through the heart of Pittsburg State University — red-brick buildings glowing in the sunlight, students and alumni converging in small clusters, the distant thump of a drumline keeping time with the day. It’s a beautiful campus in its own unpretentious way — not manicured to perfection but lived in, practical, purposeful. The kind of place that has always measured success not in prestige but in perseverance.
That has been its story from the beginning. PSU started life in 1903 as the Manual Training Auxiliary School of the State Normal School of Emporia — a mouthful of a name for a modest vision: to train teachers who could teach both mind and hand. Pittsburg was a fitting cradle for such a school. It was a town built by coal miners and machinists, by immigrants who spoke more languages than they could count but shared a belief in work as dignity. When the school became independent in 1908, it grew into the Kansas State Manual Training Normal School, teaching future educators how to weld, sew, carve, and think.
The decades reshaped it but never erased its purpose. By the 1920s, it was the Kansas State Teachers College of Pittsburg, a hub for rural education in an era when most Kansas towns were still teaching in one-room schoolhouses. After the war years, new buildings rose, the curriculum widened, and by 1977, it earned its final name — Pittsburg State University. The Kansas Technology Center, opened in the 1990s, stands today as a sleek reminder of those early manual training roots: innovation by way of craftsmanship.
We wandered past it, the metallic scent of machines faint in the air, and crossed toward Porter Hall, where art students were lugging portfolios across the lawn. Somewhere not far from here, decades ago, my mom carried her own stack of coursework — she earned her Master’s in Education from this place, after finishing her Bachelor’s at Missouri Southern. Today she’s here again, standing between her two schools, wearing both loyalties with pride.
And that’s the heart of it: our family is split perfectly between Gorilla red and Lion green. My brother and I both MSSU graduates, my mom a hybrid of both, our roots tangled across the border between Joplin and Pittsburg.
The Miners Bowl is the annual expression of that shared contradiction — a rivalry between equals, close enough that you can hear the opposing band warming up before you’ve left the parking lot. It began in 1968, named for the mining heritage that ties these towns together more tightly than any scoreboard ever could. Joplin and Pittsburg were built on coal seams and classroom dreams — their universities rising from the same soil that once fed furnaces and smelters.
By the time we reached Carnie Smith Stadium, the band was in full swing. The brass shone under the sun, the drums rolled like thunder, and the crowd — half red, half green — hummed with that electric, good-natured rivalry that feels more like family teasing than combat. You could see it in the mingled colors of the hoodies, in the easy banter of old friends on opposite sides of the bleachers. The air itself seemed divided — part barbecue smoke, part concession popcorn, all nostalgia.
I looked at my mom as she took it in — the banners, the music, the energy — and thought of all the ways these schools had shaped her, and through her, us. The education degrees she earned here and in Joplin weren’t just credentials; they were continuation — proof that a family from small-town Missouri could build and keep building, each generation climbing another rung.
When the whistle blew and the first kickoff arced high against the sun, the crowd’s roar rose into that cold blue sky — a sound born from shared history and local pride. The Lions and Gorillas might clash on the field, but their roots run side by side beneath it.
It’s a sunny day with a chill in the air. The kind of day that reminds you how rivalry can also be gratitude — how two towns, two schools, and one family can all be part of the same enduring story.