Roosevelt Field at Excelsior Springs High School which was home to the bowl until the school moved in 2003. The stadium is on the banks of the Fishing River near downtown Excelsior Springs blocks from the Hall of Waters Historic District and Elms HotelTiger Stadium at the new Excelsior Springs High School on the edge of Excelsior Springs
The first Mineral Water Bowl was played on Thanksgiving Day in 1948.[1] The game was established to showcase the Excelsior Springs High School team against another Missouri high school squad, but the Missouri High School Athletic Association never officially sanctioned it and forbade Excelsior Springs from playing in the game after 1950. (It remains unclear why Excelsior Springs was singled out while the association continued to sanction other Thanksgiving football games in the state, such as Kirkwood vs. Webster Groves, still played to this day). After the 1951 contest, which featured two opponents from outside the area, the high school Mineral Water Bowl was discontinued.
At the end of the 1952 season, an attempt to revive the bowl as a small-college contest failed after Northeast Missouri State (today Truman State), that year's co-champions of the Missouri Intercollegiate Athletics Association (today the Mid-America Intercollegiate Athletics Association), turned down an invitation to participate.[2] Undeterred by this setback, local organizers succeeded in bringing back the game as a small-college bowl two years later, in 1954.[3] The game was eventually moved from Thanksgiving Day to the Saturday before or after the holiday. As of 1957, it was one of 11 sanctioned NCAA bowl games. The bowl continued in the small-college format, hosting teams from as far away as Michigan and Colorado, but the pool of potential quality opponents dwindled after the onset of football playoffs for NCAA Division II and Division III, in 1973. Despite featuring a Missouri school in 11 of 22 contests, the bowl suffered from declining interest and was discontinued for a second time after the 1975 game. Crowds had dwindled from a peak of 7,000 in the 1960s to just 1,500 in 1974.[4]
After a gap of seventeen years, the bowl was revived as a National Junior College Athletic Association (NJCAA) postseason game, held annually on the first Saturday in December starting in 1992.[5]
In the 1996 contest, Blinn (TX) defeated Coffeyville (KS) for the NJCAA championship. The junior college bowl typically featured top-ranked teams, and the Kansas community college league--closest to the game site geographically--provided teams for six of the games, but after eight years the sponsors opted to make it an NCAA bowl once again, this time for teams from Division II.
Starting in 2000, representatives from the Mid-America Intercollegiate Athletics Association (MIAA) and Northern Sun Intercollegiate Conference (NSIC) were chosen yearly for the game, with invitations going to the top-placing team in each conference not receiving a bid to the NCAA Division II National Football Championship playoffs.[6] The arrangement between the MIAA and NSIC continued until 2017 but was eventually strained when the MIAA began to send its top non-playoff teams to four other Division II bowl games: the now-defunct Kanza Bowl (from 2009 through 2012), C.H.A.M.P.S. Heart of Texas Bowl (in 2016 and 2017), and Live United Texarkana Bowl (in 2014, 2015, and 2017), along with the Heritage Bowl (in 2017). After 2017, the NSIC had the only automatic bid to the game, with its representative facing an at-large opponent. The 2018 game featured teams from the NSIC and the Great Lakes Valley Conference. The 2019 game once again included representatives from the NSIC and MIAA, the latter chosen as an at-large team.
The COVID-19 pandemic forced the cancellation of all Division II postseason football games in 2020. Local organizers hoped to hold the Mineral Water Bowl in 2021,[7] but after failing to do so,[8] they finally gave up on continuing the game in 2022, citing a lack of sponsors.[9]
