I've watched the Blue Devils and Red Raiders play on Thanksgiving morning every year since I moved to this city in 1990, and it took me longer than I'd like to admit to notice the pattern: the game doesn't live at Doyle Field every year. It alternates. Some Thanksgivings the walk to the stadium starts from your own driveway. Other years you're driving to Fitchburg, parking near Crocker Field, and watching the Red Raiders' band march down from Academy Street before kickoff.
Thanksgiving 2026 falls on November 26, and based on how the last two years have played out, this is the year the game comes back to Leominster. Fitchburg hosted at Crocker Field in 2025. Leominster hosted at Doyle Field in 2024. If that back-and-forth holds, and it has held every year except one recent exception, Doyle Field gets the crowd this time.
That's worth knowing before you assume you're driving across town on a holiday morning.
The rotation nobody tracks until they need to
Most people who've lived here a while know the outline of the rivalry without knowing the mechanics behind it. The 2025 meeting was Leominster's 145th matchup against Fitchburg, which made it one of the longest continuously played high school football rivalries in the country. That count alone tells you this isn't a game either town treats casually. What it doesn't tell you is who's supposed to host.
The honest answer is that hosting duties swap year to year, with one notable exception. In 2023, the rivalry left both hometown stadiums entirely and was played at Fenway Park. In 2024, Fitchburg traveled to Leominster and lost 6-0 on Doyle Field's turf. In 2025, the two teams reversed, with Leominster traveling to Crocker Field and winning 59-6. Line those up and 2026 reads as Leominster's turn to host again, though neither school has published an official 2026 site as of this writing, so it's worth confirming with the schools or checking LTV or FATV listings as Thanksgiving gets closer.
If the pattern holds, that means the pregame buildup, the parking crunch on Priest Street, and the walk-up crowd all belong to Doyle Field this year instead of Crocker Field.
What actually happened in 2025, and why it still matters here
Leominster entered last year's Thanksgiving game at 7-3, carried much of the season by senior quarterback Osiris Lopez. Fitchburg came in at 2-8. On paper it looked lopsided, and it was: Leominster won 59-6, and Lopez set a state record for career touchdowns in the process, a mark the team's own athletic program announced afterward. Records like that don't happen quietly in a two-town rivalry this old. It gets replayed on local radio, referenced in the next year's pep rally, and brought up by people at the diner counter for months.
The all-time series record, based on the last full tally I could confirm from 2020, had Leominster ahead 62-47-6. The Blue Devils have added to that lead in both meetings since, so whatever the current number is, it's grown in Leominster's favor. Fitchburg fans I've talked to don't love hearing that, and I understand why. A rivalry this long isn't really about who's ahead in any single decade. It's about showing up.
A few numbers worth knowing before Thanksgiving morning:
- 146th meeting: this year's game will be the 146th all-time matchup between Leominster and Fitchburg.
- 62-47-6: Leominster's series lead as of the last published tally in 2020, before two more Blue Devils wins.
- 59-6: the final score of the 2025 Thanksgiving matchup at Crocker Field.
- 21 acres: the size of Doyle Field, gifted to the city in 1931 by former Mayor Bernard W. Doyle.
Doyle Field is a park 364 days a year and a stadium on the 365th
It's easy to think of Doyle Field only as the football stadium, especially this time of year. For most of the calendar it's something quieter. The Doyle Field Commission oversees a 21-acre property that Bernard W. Doyle gave to the city back in 1931, and it's used daily, not just on game days. Hundreds of people walk the grounds every week, kids cycle through the playground known as Imagination Station, and the fields host Leominster High's football, baseball, tennis, soccer, field hockey and track programs across the school year.
That context matters if you're new to town and only associate Doyle Field with one loud morning in late November. The rest of the year it's the place where Leominster High's spring and fall teams actually practice and compete, and it's maintained by the city's Department of Public Works Forests and Parks Division alongside the Commission itself. Thanksgiving just happens to be the one day it fills up early and stays full.
The voices you'll hear if you're not in the stands
If you're staying home this year, or if you just want the game running in the kitchen while you handle the turkey, the broadcast tradition here has stayed remarkably consistent even as kickoff times have shifted. LTV, Leominster's community access channel, and FATV, Fitchburg's equivalent, have carried the game live for years. Kickoff has moved around a little year to year: the 2024 broadcast ran from 9 AM to 1 PM, while the 2025 broadcast started at 10 AM. Check the current listing on either station as the date approaches rather than assuming last year's start time.
On radio, WPKZ's "K-Zone" team calls the game as part of their regular high school sports coverage, and they've referred to it specifically as "the Thanksgiving Day Classic" in their own programming notes. One of their play-by-play voices, Kate Robbins, isn't an outside hire brought in for a big game. She's a lifelong Leominster resident, a three-sport, twelve-season varsity athlete and five-time team captain at Leominster High School herself before she ever picked up a headset. That's the kind of detail that tells you this broadcast isn't treating the rivalry as content. It's treating it as hometown business.
What Fitchburg gets that we don't, this year
On the years Fitchburg hosts, there's a piece of pregame ritual that Leominster residents don't see up close: the march from Academy Street to the Crocker Field grounds, led by the Marching Red Raiders and the cheer team. It's been a fixture of Fitchburg's home games for years, and the 2025 season added the FHS ROTC Color Guard to the procession, coordinated with help from band director Tabitha Greenlees, cheer coaches Mariah Comeau and Tina Doyle, ROTC's Victor Rojas, and Fitchburg PD's school resource officer Tony Pennetti guiding the group safely across downtown.
It's a good reminder that hosting isn't just about home field advantage on the scoreboard. It's about which town's pregame traditions get to play out in front of a full crowd that year. If Doyle Field hosts in 2026 as the rotation suggests, that march belongs to Fitchburg's next home year instead, and Leominster's own pregame routine, whatever shape it takes at Doyle Field this time around, gets its turn in front of the home crowd.
What this means for your Thanksgiving morning
The rivalry itself traces back to 1897, and for a stretch in the early 1900s the two schools actually played twice a season, once in the fall and once on Thanksgiving, before settling into the single holiday matchup everyone knows now. One of the last times they played twice in the same year on purpose was 1916, at grounds that don't even exist anymore under those names, the old Pearl Street Fairgrounds and the old Driving Park. A century later, the game format has simplified, but the stakes clearly haven't.
If you've been in Leominster long enough to have an opinion about where to park near Doyle Field, you already knew this game mattered. What's easy to miss is that the home crowd, the pregame routine, and the walk to the stadium aren't a Leominster fixture every single year. They rotate. This year, if the pattern holds, they're ours again.
Whether you end up in the bleachers at Doyle Field or watching from your kitchen table on LTV, I'll be doing what I've done every fall since 1990: paying close attention to this city, this game, and the people who show up for both. If you're ever curious about what makes a specific Leominster street or neighborhood tick beyond one Thanksgiving morning, that's the kind of local detail I spend the rest of my year tracking too. Feel free to reach out through Doug Tammelin any time you want a local's read on this market.
