“We were clearly beaten by a better team,” HHS head coach Gene Mastin said Saturday morning. “If we were to play them 10 times, we might be able to give them a game in two or three. They’re outstanding and I hope to heck they win a state championship this year. That said, and I told the team this, I thought we played without passion, I thought we tried to carry over from the week before and just assumed that it would come with us — there were some players who quit. Looking back at it from a coach’s standpoint, there were a lot of things we could have done better to prepare. It isn’t a situation where we’re saying that the players did this and we’re absolving ourselves from any accountability. In football, in sports and in life you very rarely get do-overs and we don’t get that again. We won’t make any excuses and there’s no place for moral victories in the middle of a season."

“They have not been that flawless and, in fact, one of the guys working the chain crew and couple other people had said that this was as sharp as LeRoy has looked all year,” Mastin added when asked about LeRoy’s near-perfect execution. “Great teams peak at playoff time and they certainly are. We just wish them all kinds of well during the remainder of their season.”

The win also marked LeRoy’s 43rd straight at home, a streak dating back to the ’98 season when Mastin’s Raiders edged the Knights, 7-0.

“I didn’t even know it until a few weeks ago when somebody was telling us how many we had in a row,” Moran said. “It’s just a great thing, it’s a great tradition that we have here at LeRoy — we’ve been playing football for over 100 years. We’re just glad to be playing and we’re glad to be a part of that.”

LeRoy opened up a 6-0 lead on the third play of its first possession when Andrew Alexander caught a screen pass and took it 40 yards to the endzone. With 5:02 remaining in the first quarter, Hornell knotted the game at six on the first play of its third possession. Austin Dwyer took a handoff from Zach Harkenrider and trotted 72 yards down the sideline to paydirt.

The Knights answered right back, scoring seven plays later when Quentin Humphrey hauled in a 41-yard touchdown pass from Travis Fenstermaker. A converted point after attempt made it 13-6 with a 1:40 left in the first. HHS followed with a three-and-out, giving LeRoy the ball back near midfield on a 17-yard punt. Two plays later Alexander struck again, this time on a 20-yard fade pass from Fenstermaker to the right corner of the endzone. The scoring drive — set up by a 27-yard pitch and catch from Fenstermaker to Mike Humphrey — spanned 39 seconds and made the score 20-6. The Knights would never look back, outscoring their guests 21-13 over the remainder of the game.

The Knights finished with 376 yards of total offense compared with 299 for Hornell. Fenstermaker completed 11 of his 15 attempts for 223 yards, a clear difference in his team’s victory.

“That’s one of the things we looked at,” Moran said when asked about the Knight’s air attack and its ability to expose a weak secondary. “HF-L beat them earlier in the year and they threw the ball at ’em. We looked at some of those things. Not only Mike Humphrey, but his brother, Quentin, played very well. Then, you can rotate Andrew Alexander into some situations. It puts a lot of pressure on a defense. They are three really exceptional athletes. Plus, Travis (Fenstermaker) is throwing the ball as well as anybody we’ve ever had here."

“I don’t know if it was the run opening up the pass or the pass opening up the run,” Moran continued. “We were able to do some things in both areas. It’s nice when you have the ability to spread a defense out with some great athletes. It just puts so much pressure on a defense. Sometimes it can be extremely hard to cover everybody.”

Mastin agreed.

“We have had problems all year with spread offenses,” Mastin said. “What spread offenses allow you do is to get a great athlete in a one-on-one with an individual defender. Our kids in the secondary have a lot of heart, but we aren’t fast and we aren’t experienced. We’ve tried to play some of those situations in man-to-man both during the HF-L game and last night. That won’t happen again. We’re going to devise some different schemes to play. That’s why I don’t just put it on the players, I also put it on us as coaches, and me in particular as the head coach, to come up with some different packages.”

Dwyer finished with 116 yards on 14 carries to lead the Raiders (5-2). Sam Stonerock followed with 68 yards on 10 carries, while Harkenrider, who passed for five yards after completing two of his 10 attempts with one interception, was next with 56 rushing yards on seven carries.

“The inconsistency on offense ... we knew that if we could get on the edge we’d have a pretty good shot with them,” Mastin said. “There were a couple of plays there, Austin’s long touchdown run being one of them and another long run that came back with a penalty, where we were able to do that. But, tackle-to-tackle they were very good. It wasn’t that they were physically better, they were just so fundamentally sound and that’s the case every year. We’ve beaten them three times, but very rarely, even in those wins, have we been able to run the ball right at them. If you’re going to beat LeRoy you’ve got to do it on the edge and in the air. We weren’t really highly effective in either place last night.”

The Raiders were also dealing with a number of injuries, primarily sustained in the Week 6 victory over Bath-Haverling. However, Mastin said they played little, if any, role in the final verdict.

“I’ve heard some people express concern during the week about the injuries that we’ve had,” Mastin said. “The only thing that the injuries prevented was having more available players during practice. But that probably wouldn’t have changed the outcome of the game. The fact is, they were better and our hats are truly off to them for the great way in which they won the game. One of the other things I’ll add to that is, sometimes Brian is accused of running scores up and things such as that. They could have named their score last night and it was only by the fact that they showed us mercy that it wasn’t 70 or something of that nature. I appreciated that and after the game I told him that."

“I didn’t think we had the capacity to play that bad and that’s the part that scares me,” Mastin said. “I’m not sure which team is showing up. I told them in our morning meeting, that this week is going to be the toughest week of the season. We are going to run this week as though it were the preseason. We’re going to go back and get physical again. We’re going to play tough football. They got a pass last week because of some of the injuries. There will be no passes this week.”

Based on Bath’s 33-24 victory over Bishop Kearney Saturday, the Raiders enter the Section V, Class B postseason playoffs as the No. 4 seed and will host No. 5 Livonia Friday at 7 p.m. at Maple City Park. The Rams end up with the two-seed and will host No. 7 Pal-Mac. East Rochester-Gananda, the No. 3 seed, hosts No. 6 Attica and top-seeded Geneva has a first-round home game against No. 8 Batavia.

“We’re not backing in,” Mastin said. “We’ve had a tough stretch of games here — HF-L, Bath and LeRoy. Our kids, until last night, have hung tough through those. There are just a lot of lessons along the way that you learn. After the HF-L game we could have folded and the next week we play well against Bath. I think we tried to rest on our laurels a little last night and you can’t do that either. It’s a darn shame the kids learn things the hard way like this, but the best thing about last night is that we still have another week to draw our swords. We’re not packing up our equipment, we’ve still got another game to play. Once you get to the playoffs you’re in one-week seasons and we’re going to string this just as long as it can possibly go.”

“They may have the longest win streak in Section V. In fact, if they don’t I don’t know who would,” HHS veteran head coach Gene Mastin, who holds a win-loss record of 3-4 against LeRoy, said Thursday afternoon. “We beat them there in 1998, 7-0, on a pass from Kyle Johnson to Andy Norton. That was the last time they lost there. That said, we haven’t played them there since then. We played them here three times and once at PAETEC Park. We beat them here, we beat them at PAETEC Park and we lost to them here twice.

“It’s one of the best fields and one of the best facilities in Section V,” Mastin continued. “A definite home-field advantage, always. That’s a team that’s got it and they’ve shown it through their numbers. It’s been 10 years since they’ve lost there. For us, we’re just going to go play. At this point of the season, you snap up the chin strap, you put band-aids on the boo-boos and you go play. There really isn’t any other way to say it. It’s football season and we’re deep in it.”

The Raiders suffered plenty of boo-boos in last week’s 14-7 victory over Bath-Haverling. Kicker-tight end Isaac Spike will miss tonight’s game and according to Mastin, several others will be game-time decisions. However, Adam Dwyer, the Red Raider who left last week’s game in an ambulance late in the third quarter, will be back in action, starting on defense for HHS.

“What we’ve had to do this week is really tone down practice,” Mastin said. “It’s disconcerting for me as a coach because I want to go to practice and run a really up-tempo, focused practiced with the idea that we’re going to get better in practice. But this was a week where we had to spend more time just getting players back ready to play. We’ve got a three-game stretch here that’s just absolutely as challenging as anything that I’ve seen. HF-L, when you look back at it and now that they’re 4-2 after handling Livonia pretty well, is a really good team. The two losses were to Bath and Newark at the beginning of the year, and that’s really when they didn’t have their full team together. They’re just impressive now. Then, you’ve got Bath and they’re always physical. Now, you get LeRoy. This is a tough run for us. If we can get through this with everybody healthy it should help prepare us to play in sectionals, but it really does mark the end of a brutal stretch of the schedule.”

While LeRoy doesn’t usually line up in a spread offense, Mastin believes the Oatkan Knights will likely follow HF-L’s lead by attempting to employ the use of the non-traditional offense in several situations.

“I would guess that they’ll try to spread us out a lot based on what they’ve seen,”?Mastin said. “We did a pretty good job of stuffing the run last week, containing a very good running team. While they will always step up and try to hit you in that sense, I think they’ve been gearing toward being a little more wide open. They beat us 21-14 here last year and the play of the game probably was the fourth-and-two from midfield that they ended up throwing a touchdown pass on."

“They’re not the LeRoy that they were 10 years ago in the fact that they would just line up in a power-I and try to run it down your throat the entire game. Although, they’ll still do that, too.”

“They might be better than Bath on paper, but there are a lot of differences,” added on the Knights, who average 42.8 points per game while giving up an average of 17. “They’re obviously on of the top Class C teams in the entire state and probably one of the top Class C programs in the entire state year-in and year-out.”

Friday, October 17, 2008 (07:30 PM)
League game at Hartwood Park, LeRoy NY
Livingston County Division I/II

LeRoy Oatkan Knights 41, Hornell Red Raiders 19