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The Wakefield Trojans hosted Pender’s Pendragons for a contest last Friday, Sept. 9, taking a win over the visiting team at Gardner Stadium, 64-62.
The win moves the Trojans to 2-1 on the regular season of play.
The Trojans came out ahead in the first quarter, 14-6, and both teams had a big second quarter battle, 22-22, for a score at halftime of 36-28. The third quarter went to Pender, 21-16, bringing the score to 52-49, and the Pendragons continued their advance in the fourth, 13-12, but came up two points short of overcoming the Trojans on their home field, and gave the Wakefield team their second win of the season.
“It's really pretty hard to find words to describe the game. It's definitely one that we as a coaching staff and the players will be talking about and reminiscing about for years to come,” said Coach Mike Hassler. “I've been talking to the boys about fighting through failure since the beginning of the season. Football is a rough, ugly game and every snap someone wins and someone loses. There isn't time to feel sorry for yourself in the course of a football game when the guy across from you beats you. You have to move on to the next play and keep fighting. I thought the boys embodied that mentality Friday night versus Pender. These are the types of games that you look back on and it just makes you proud as a head coach to have a group that is willing to put it all on the line for four quarters like they did.”
Cade Johnson had a big game for the Trojans – helping his team put up seven touchdowns on his own, plus running in a number of two-point conversions; Jacob Borg had a 79-yard touchdown return, and Tim Kaufman had one touchdown and ran in conversions as well.
“We did what we needed to do to win the game. It wasn't always pretty, but we ground clock and kept the Pender offense off the field for as long as we could,” said Hassler. “We doubled them in time of possession, and when you are going against a high powered offense like they have, that plays a huge part into staying in a ball game. I love our tenacity off the ball and I really feel like as a unit we are getting into people. The next phase is going to be finishing plays. I don't think we are a whistle to whistle team yet. If we can get to that point we will be a tough offense to slow down.”
Wakefield posted 452 yards to Pender’s 472, but were able to get 65 plays in compared to Pender’s 43. The Trojans had 317 yards rushing and 135 yards through the air.
Johnson had 170 yards for his team on 36 attempts. Tim Kaufman had 138 yards and Isaac Walsh had nine. Johnson’s favored target was Caleb Chase, with two receptions and 70 yards. Hunter Schultz had three catches with 40 yards and Tim Kaufman had one reception for 25 yards.
Penalties got in the way of the Pendragons, costing the team 75 yards, and Wakefield got docked only 30.
“We have a lot of work to do. We are really young on that side of the ball and it definitely showed on Friday night,” said Coach Hassler. “We need to be more dependable as individuals and do our jobs and use our technique. As the game wore on we had a lot of guys try to do more than one job, and in other cases we found ourselves in tough positions due to our lack of technique. It will be a big focus in practice this week to get back to the basics.”
Leading Tacklers for the Trojans were Cade Johnson (15 solo/2 assisted; Tim Kaufman 1 solo/6 assisted; Walker Lundahl (2 solo/3 assisted) and Brad Haglund (2 solo/1.5 sacks).
The Trojans will be traveling to place Tri-County Northeast’s Wolfpack (1-2) this week on Friday, Sept. 16, “We will definitely need to bring our physicality to Emerson with us this coming Friday. On film their boys play hard and get after it, they definitely don't have a problem with contact. This is a big week for us, we are nowhere near where we need to be. As we do every week, we will focus on us and look to take a few more strides forward come Friday night.”