The Medical Lake football squad (0-1, 0-3) may have lost the game against the Lakeside Eagles (1-0, 1-2) at home on Thursday, Sept. 19, but they never stopped striving for the win in a game that boasted over 300 Cardinal passing yards.
“I don’t know the last time we had a 300 yard passer and two 100-yard receivers,” head coach Jeremy Bahr said.
It only took the Eagles six minutes to get on the board from the one yard line to make it a 7-0 game. But then the Cardinals only needed one minute to respond on a 72-yard pass to senior Kaleb Vinson from junior quarterback Ashton Hamilton-Becker to give the Cardinals a one-point lead and a burst of enthusiastic pride after a 2-point conversion.
The Eagles, whose 218-yard ground game stymied Medical Lake’s defense all evening, came back to find the end zone four more times before Medical Lake could score another TD in the final seconds of the first half on a 40-yard Hamilton-Becker pass to 6-foot-1-inch senior Kolby Wren, who ran it into the end zone to close the first half 33-16 Eagles.
The Cardinals came back after halftime, scoring on a 39-yard pass from Hamilton-Becker to Kaleb Vinson for six points. While the extra point was shanked, Vinson’s TD brought the Cardinals to within 10 points of the Eagles.
But that narrowed scoring gap didn’t last long after Lakeside scored three back-to-back TDs to again widen the score further, and by 8:17 in the fourth the Eagles had jacked up their lead 54-22.
Despite the gap, the Cardinal football squad was far from quitting. With 6:45 left in the game, Hamilton-Becker again connected to Wren in the air, who ran the ball in for a Medical Lake TD and a 54-30 score.
Hamilton-Becker, in a style perhaps reminiscent of Russell Wilson, did plenty of scrambling during the game, and managed to find the end zone himself from the 25-yard line with 1:56 left in the game. With a two-point conversion the Cardinals narrowed the final score to 54-36.
Hamilton-Becker rushed eight times for nine yards and one TD, going 14 for 31 for 332 yards and four TDs.
“It was a great effort,” Bahr said of his Cardinals. “We’re starting to finally make some reads, at least offensively. Defense was another matter.”
Bahr felt the offense could have reached 400 yards passing if it weren’t for dropped passes.
The Eagle defense essentially stopped the Medical Lake rushing game in its tracks. With the exception of Hamilton-Becker, Cardinal rushing was in overall negative territory for the game, held to just four yards on the ground.
“We couldn’t run the ball, but I think we’re getting some things identified,” he said.
Not so their passing game, with Vinson going 6 for 160 yards and two TDs, and Wren three for nine for 109 yards and two TDs. Joe Oliver had one catch for 32 yards, while Jordan Peterson was one for 22, Brandon Giles one for nine and Jon Anderson one for one.
While the Eagles had 45 more total yards than the Cardinals, 218 of those were on the ground compared to 332 passing yards for Medical Lake.
The key stat in the game may be first down conversions. While Lakeside converted 17, despite being penalized eight times for 85 yards, the Cards only managed seven conversions.
“I love the excitement,” Bahr told his team in the post-game huddle. “I love the encouragement.”
The Cardinals have a bye-week this week to get healthy, work on fundamentals and find, “the correctable issues,” Bahr said. They next face the Freeman Scotties (0-1, 0-3) on the road Friday, Oct. 4 at 7 p.m.
Lee Hughes can be reached at [email protected].
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