They are calling it spring football but it was cold — 52 degrees — at Wildcat Stadium on Friday night during the Battle of Peabody Road between Vanden and Will C. Wood High Schools in the first football game of the season for both squads.
Only two family members per athlete or cheerleader were allowed in the stands due to COVID, but they made themselves heard in a match that stayed close until the Vikings blew it open with a 72-yard pass play from Tre Dimes to Daniel Hughes midway through the fourth quarter. Vanden went on to prevail 34-13.
Vanden sophomore quarterback Tre Dimes connected on 8 of 16 passes for 178 yards and threw touchdown passes to three different receivers.
With Vanden up 21-13 in the final stanza, the Vikings faced a third and 27 from their own 28-yard line. Hughes ran a crossing route and Dimes found him in stride in the middle of the field.
“Our coaches up in the box saw that we had the middle of the field open,” said Dimes. “The safety moved right where I wanted him to and I just gave him (Hughes) the ball and I just let him do the rest.”
“When I caught it I already knew I was gone,” said Hughes, a junior. “We practiced that play all week. It was just a matter of time if we ran it or not. Pretty glad that we ran it. I just saw green grass.”
Hughes, a strong safety on defense, excelled on both sides of the ball, recovering a Wood fumble in the second quarter.
Vanden senior running back Linairus Agee ate up yardage for the Vikings, accumulating 106 yards on 15 carries, including an eight-yard touchdown run on Vanden’s opening drive. He also had a 23-yard run on that drive.
Dimes spread the wealth, dealing touchdown passes to Hughes, Johnte McDowell and Konar McLeod.
McLeod was also outstanding on the other side of the ball at linebacker.
After Vanden took a 7-0 lead on the Agee touchdown at 5:19 in the first quarter and a Diego Nunez-Smith extra point, Vanden stopped Wood. Michael Belk returned the punt 32 yards to the Wood 23-yard line. But Wood’s Devin Copta-Vaughan picked off a Dimes’ pass to squelch the drive.
After Wood went three-and-out, Dimes led his team down to the Wood 18, from where he connected with McDowell to make it 13-0. The point-after-touchdown made it 14-0 with 8:52 left in the second quarter.
Wood took the ensuing kickoff and put together an impressive drive. Senior running back Joseph Minor broke loose for a 41-yard run down to the Vanden 31-yard line. The Wildcats took it all the way down to the three-yard line but fumbled and Hughes fell on it for the Vikings.
However, Wood forced Vanden into a three-and-out, and Vanden’s punter couldn’t handle the snap. When he tried to make a run for it, Wood dropped him back on the Vanden nine-yard line.
Wood made it a little too exciting, gaining only eight yards on three plays to make it fourth-and-goal from the one. But Wood’s Ken Tilford executed a nice quarterback keeper for the score with just 32 seconds remaining in the half. Emmanuel Nwagbarfa kicked the extra point to make it 14-7 Vanden.
The teams went back and forth in the third quarter until Wood broke through, the key play on the drive another quarterback keeper by Tilford, this one for 72 yards all the way down to the Vanden four-yard line. On second-and-goal from the one-yard line, Minor busted in for the touchdown with 3:40 left in the quarter.
But a fumbled snap on the extra point kept Wood behind, 14-13.
On the ensuing kickoff, Vanden’s Sean Davis took the ball on his own 15 and ran it 54 yards to the Wood 31-yard line. Vanden drove it down to the Wood 11-yard line. Then Dimes found McLeod in the end zone for a 21-13 lead after the extra point with nine seconds left in the third quarter.
After Wood went three-and-out, Dimes connected on the big play with Hughes for a TD to make it 27-13 with 7:57 remaining in the game, the extra point failing on a bad snap.
Wood was unable to mount a fourth-quarter comeback, and Vanden added a touchdown by Davis from two yards out and an extra point with just 25 seconds left on the clock.
“We were really excited in the beginning of the game,” said Vanden head coach Sean Murphy. “We were a little overhyped… We were so excited about being back on the football field playing against someone else it’s hard to hold them back. I think we had an adrenaline dump at some point.”
That seemed to happen around the end of the second quarter and beginning of the third, when the Vikings settled into their game.
Dimes had only one and a half games of varsity experience under his belt from last year but looked very mature behind the snap.
“He did a really good job, very good command of the offense,” said Murphy.
Hughes called him “a great young quarterback.”
Dimes deflected the praise, saying, “We have a very talented wide receiver group. We work very hard after practice on timing routes. They make my job easy because they know where I want them to be.”
As captain of the defense, Hughes makes Dimes work very hard on offense in practice, and vice versa.
“We come together and talk to each other about how we want things to move,” said Dimes. “We just push each other very hard, even at practice, even if he is on scout or I am on scout. I ask him what we need to work on and we just piggyback on each other.”
The Score
VANDEN 34, WILL C. WOOD 13
Next games: Wood at Rodriguez, Friday, 7:30 p.m.; Cardinal Newman (Santa Rosa) at Vanden (non-conference game), 7:30 p.m.
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