Narrow escape: Fitch takes down Harding for second straight week, 35-28
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AUSTINTOWN -- The old saying is that “it’s always hard to beat a team twice.”
Try doing it two weeks in a row.
After Austintown Fitch capped off its regular season with a 42-33 victory over Harding last Friday, the dominos fell the exact way to set up a round two.
In what was a dogfight to the final seconds, the Falcons took the second matchup against Harding as well, halting the Raiders 35-28 in the first round of the Division II, Region 5 playoffs.
This wasn’t just a “revenge game” for Harding. Fitch’s season ended at the Raiders’ hands last season, so both teams came out with extra fire.
“It’s easy to say ‘It’s a tournament, do or die,’ but then it’s do or die versus a team that took you out last year, so everything heightens there,” Falcons coach T.J. Parker said. “You try not to think about it, but it’s there. It surrounds you like, ‘This can’t happen again’.
“That’s the one thing we told the kids, ‘You’re not playing with fear tonight. We’re playing excited and we’re going at them and we’re going to meet them’ and I thought they did that tonight. We wanted it tonight and that’s what I was most proud of. We really, really wanted it tonight.”
That mentality led Fitch to getting two touchdowns on the board in the first quarter. Senior quarterback Devin Sherwood hit Cam Smith and Jayden Eley on 33 and 27-yard strikes to put the Falcons up 14-0 at the end of the first.
But a team like Harding wasn’t just going to lay down and let Fitch walk all over them for four quarters. The Raiders responded with two touchdowns of their own in the second and third quarters to enter the final frame at a 14-14 deadlock
Sherwood completed two more touchdown passes in the fourth quarter, both of which went to Tyler Evans. The senior quarterback finished the game 14-of-20 for 242 yards and four touchdowns.
Knowing this is his last ride as a high school athlete, Sherwood is pulling out all the stops.
“This is a huge confidence game, obviously,” he said. “I mean, it’s win or die now and it’s my senior season. The next game I lose, I’m never going to go play high school football again, so it just means a whole lot.”
When the Raiders began to rally back, it was the Falcon defense that kept the team afloat. Defending athletes like Dom Foster, Dalys Jett and Tyriq Ivory is no easy task, but the Fitch defense held strong.
“It’s tough to defend those guys, but I thought our defense came up and made plays,” Parker said. “When our offense was sputtering in the second half, our defense was forcing 3-and-outs, we got good field position, then we got going.
“Then from there, it turned into that old Falcon four-quarter game. Back and forth, back and forth. It’s a relief. Now we need to look on to next week and we know what we have in front of us.”
The Falcons (7-3) now advance to take on state powerhouse Archbishop Hoban on Friday.
The Raiders, like their record shows, experienced a turbulent season full of tests. With a gauntlet of a schedule that featured contests against Medina, Hudson and Ursuline, the Raiders played until the final snap, where Jett heaved the ball toward the end zone to try and force overtime had the pass not been broken up.
Four of Harding's six losses this season were within a score.
"It was up and down," Harding coach Steve Arnold said about his team's season. "I think as a head coach it's frustrating when you lose so many close games against very good football teams. We're a really good football team, but things happen during the course of the season and sometimes things don't go the way that you want them to go, and that's kind of what transpired tonight."
Harding's season ends at 5-6 and graduates a senior class that includes Foster and Ivory.