By Skiffo Drake
The news was not good.
Wayne Valley senior quarterback, the highly-touted college prospect, Nick Goodwin went down with a foot injury in Week 5. All eyes shifted to the talented, but untested junior quarterback Grant Ferrauilo.
That made sense to Wayne Valley head coach Roger Kotlarz, in part.
“When the starting quarterback goes down, everyone wants to know about the backup,” Kotlarz said. “That’s natural, but it’s only part of the story. When the quarterback gets hurt, everyone has to step up. Very often, teams can’t recover from a loss like that. Fortunately, we have an extremely deep and talented group of senior leaders. When adversity hit, they rose to the challenge.”
With numerous seniors leading the way, Valley’s winning ways continued. They are currently 8-0 heading into tomorrow’s cross-town tussle with Wayne Hills. That game will settle the Big North Colonial Division Championship.
Then, Valley (No. 5) focuses on the Section I, Group IV playoffs and a first round game at Morris Knolls (No. 4, 6-2) next week.
Several WV seniors are statistical leaders: Will Kearney (604 rushing yards), Ryan Monteyne (456 receiving yards), Adam Lounsbery (63 tackles), Vinny Tedesco (3.5 sacks), Michael Ocello (4 interceptions), Connor Olaya (40 extra points), and Sean Lewandoski (377 punting yards) .
Many seniors are also among the tackling leaders: Kearney (51), Tedesco (44), Anthony Cerciello (35), Tyler Andreas (32) and Ryan Coyle (31). Lewandoski is also making a big contribution at linebacker, while Justin Botero, Tyler Walther and Olaya are big contributors in the secondary.
Andreas, the only two-way lineman, teams with five other seniors who have collectively cleared the way for 1,954 rushing yards. The group includes Mike Ludwig, John Duncan, PJ Chak, Ryan Van Demark and Tyler Burchell.
Other seniors making significant impacts include David Duran, Johnny Rikowich, Chris McGuinness, Ramon Ortiz, Adam Piczczatoski, Nick Fakhoury, James Velazquez, and Sahil Sangani.
For this group, the 2015 successes were a long time coming.
“When we were growing up, Wayne Valley’s football team was always around .500,” said tightend Ryan Monteyne. “We knew when we came in as freshmen that we had a lot of talent and that we would be the ones to turn things around here.”
That turn-around initially appeared to be occurring right away. When this year’s senior class were freshmen (2012), they watched from the stands in awe as the Wayne Valley varsity defeated Wayne Hills, 23-17.
“That was an amazing game,” Tedesco recalled about that Week 2 game. “But that team ended up going 4-6. We didn’t do much better than that when we were sophomores (4-6 again) or as juniors (5-5).”
Valley lost to Hills in 2013 in overtime, 17-14. Valley then lost soundly to Hills in 2014, 36-0.
“The record should have been better the last three years,” Tedesco said. “We had a lot of injuries, but that’s no excuse. We’ve definitely got things back on track this year, but we’re still hungry. Our jobs are far from done.”
“We’re proud to be 8-0, but at the same time we realize that we haven’t even come close to playing our best game yet,” Kearney said. “We’re getting better each week and now that we have the playoffs coming up, we’re confident that everything is going to click all at once.”
While the senior class is indeed strong, the players also give a lot of credit to the underclassmen.
“We wouldn’t be here without the juniors,” Monteyne says. “We have a strong senior class, but the younger guys are deep across the board as well. Valley is going to be good next year after we graduate. ”
Juniors among the offensive statistical leaders include Ferrauilo (679 passing yards), Nick Gould (578 rushing yards), Joe Scancarella (295 receiving yards and 336 return yards), Jordan Montero (136 receiving yards) and Elijah Beard (111 receiving yards).
Joe Monsen (45 tackles), Jake Pluta (26 tackles) and Montero (19 tackles) are among the junior defensive leaders.
Valley, in fact, may be good well beyond next year.
“The sophomores are good and freshmen had a great season. The youth teams in town (Boys Club and PAL) are very strong too,” Tedesco said. “Valley is going to be good for a long time. Years from now, we will be able to say that we were the class that got it all started.”
“We spoke about that a lot this summer,” Kearney added. “Our goal is to establish a legacy. We want the younger kids to look up to us and proud to the join Wayne Valley football family.”
https://twitter.com/SkiffoDrake
No comments:
Post a Comment