GREENFIELD — An early injury to senior quarterback Gavin Arsenault didn’t slow down the Greenfield football team on Friday night, as the Green Wave (2-4) road the hot hand of freshman quarterback Casey Burke to a 14-7 win over Mahar at Vets Field.
Burke was involved in the final scoring play of the game, however on the defensive side of the ball. With Greenfield up 8-7 with just over three minutes left in the game, a run up the middle from the Senators (2-4) running back Carter Hardy ended with the ball on the grass, with Burke scooping the ball up and scoring from around 20 yards out, putting the Green Wave up six.
This wasn’t the last time Burke impacted the game in a positive way for the home team. With Greenfield backed up to its own goal line with under two minutes to play and facing a second and long, Burke aired it out to Alvin Richardson who made the catch on a 54-yard pass, all but securing the win. A few kneel-downs later, the Green Wave earned their second win of the year.
Adding to his already impressive night, Burke picked off Mahar quarterback Freeland Ringer at the end of the first half, halting any chance of a score for the visitors before the break.
“[It was] a lot of good, I’ve had him as a football player since second grade,” Greenfield head coach Jeff Bengtson said of Burke’s performance. “I knew he could do it, it was just getting him to know that he could do it. And tonight, he did a great job.”
Greenfield’s first score of the game came with 11:41 left in the second quarter, when Kymel Ramsey evaded tacklers and made it to the outside, taking the ball 45 yards to the house. Ramsey scored the following 2-point conversion on a rush, which would ultimately be the only scoring the Green Wave needed.
“We’ve struggled quite a bit, just because of our age, when you have freshman going against seniors,” Bengtson said. “They played hard, they played tough, they made some good plays and they made some mistakes that we’ve worked on throughout the year, and we’ll continue to work on them.”
The first score of the game was from the visitors, on a 24-yard touchdown pass from Ringer to running back Lee Cruz, coming with under 20 seconds left in the first quarter. The ensuing extra-point attempt from Hunter Brooks was good, which gave the Senators a 7-0 lead.
It was tough going for both offenses on Friday, with the pigskin ping-ponging between the 30-yard lines for much of the game.
“It’s just another tough game where I feel like we’re right into it, and we’re just beating ourselves,” Mahar head coach Kyle Newton said. “We’re a young team with a lot to learn, and right now we have to learn how not to beat ourselves.”
Up next for Greenfield is a trip to Ware, with that game taking place next Friday at 7 p.m. Mahar returns home for a matchup with Martha’s Vineyard on Saturday, Oct. 24 at 1 p.m.
“We’re going to put this game behind us and focus on Ware,” Bengtson said. “There was some good this game, some bad this game [and] we’ll focus on the bad [at practice]. We’ll get some work done on it and come up big next week against Ware.”
