Class C All-Stars

May 30, 2012 — Its June! Its time for baseball, softball, soccer and hopefully better weather. Wait a minute! Why in the world then would a football be flying through the air this Saturday night at Alumni Coliseum. It’s actually a scheduled event that has become a fixture in Butte for over two decades. Its the 29th annual Bob Cleverley eight-man All-Star football game. This will be the twenty-third straight year that Butte has hosted the All-Star Game. It pits the best of the best from Class C football across the state. The game was a vision of Bob Cleverley, the former coach at Ennis High School. He and some of his coaching friends felt Class C football players were being overlooked for the only all-star game in the state, the Shrine Game. So Cleverley and his friends came up with a Class C All-Star
game. Thanks to the help of Universal Athletics and Pepsi Cola the game got off the ground in 1984. The first contest was played in Bozeman on the Montana State campus. The game struggled to draw much of an audience. So the contest was moved during its first six years between Bozeman, Missoula and Billings. The game struggled in each
of those towns due to a lack of community support both in the stands and from sponsorship. The game was on its last legs financially when a group of Butte business people led by Montana Tech Coach Bob Green convinced the Board of Directors of the game to give Butte a try as the host site. The contest was moved to Butte in 1990 with the first game played at Bulldog Memorial Stadium because new light poles were being
installed at Alumni Coliseum on the Montana Tech. The game due over 2,000 people, the
largest crowd ever for the game. The local Butte business people helped out as well but supplying over three-thousand dollars in sponsorships for the event. The Treasure State Class C All-Star game had a new home, Butte. It also had lots of hope for the future. The next year, in 1991, the game was moved to Alumni Coliseum. Since then the game has become a classic. It consistently draws large crowds to the contest, plus has better than 300 attend a Friday night banquet that this year will be held at the Copper King Inn. The
title name of the game was changed to the Bob Cleverley Class C All-Star Classic shortly before the long-time head of the contest past away from his bout with cancer a few years ago. The game pits the top 60 players in Class C against each other with the two teams split based on divisions. Who wins every year is not as important as the experience the young players get just playing in an all-star game before more fans than are in their hometowns. Its indeed a classic, the Bob Cleverley Class C All-Star football game. Saturday night the football will be in the air at 7 PM as 60 young players get the chance of a lifetime.