It is incredible how many little things had to happen for the Turners Falls High School football team to win the western Mass. Division IV-A title Friday night.
I already have the tendency to get verbose in my write-ups of football games, wanting to include as many plays as possible, because I do realize how many plays can be the difference between winning and losing. That was never more apparent than on Friday, when the top-seeded and still unbeaten Indians (10-0) pulled a rabbit out of their hat with a pair of touchdowns in the final minutes of the game to knock off second-seeded and previously unbeaten Mt. Greylock (9-1) for the team’s second crown in four years.
I decided to head over to the Powertown on Monday afternoon to sit with the team during its film session, asking head coach Chris Lapointe for permission on Sunday night and gaining access. When I arrived, the team had just gotten out of class for the day and was waiting for the coaches to show up. I got a minute with quarterback Tionne Brown and running back Quinn Doyle and we talked about the improbable comeback. Mt. Greylock took a 10-point lead (24-14) with 3 minutes, 51 seconds left in the game, meaning the Indians needed to score two touchdowns in under four minutes. I admitted to the players that I thought their goose was cooked at that point. And could you fault me? Turners Falls hadn’t scored since the first minute of the second quarter and there was no reason to think they were suddenly going to put a pair of touchdowns on the board. Both players said they felt like they still did have a chance to score, but that there was only one real drawback.
“I just didn’t know if we had enough time,” Doyle said.
“Yeah, I knew we could do it, I just didn’t know if there was enough time left for two drives,” Brown concurred. “Plus we needed to get a defensive stop in there.”
As we all would witness as Lapointe and the team broke down the game film, that’s exactly what the team got. Brown drove the team down the field on back-to-back drives and the defense made a huge stop in between. It culminated with a 2-yard touchdown catch by Owen Ortiz with five seconds to play that lifted the Indians to the 26-24 victory and moved the team on to Saturday’s Division IV-A state semifinal game against Maynard High School, which defeated St. Bernard’s High School, 6-0, for the central Mass. championship. That game was originally scheduled for 5 p.m. on Saturday at Doyle Field in Leominster, but Lapointe told me on Monday afternoon that the time has been moved to 6 p.m.
So what exactly happens during a film session? It is somewhat hallowed ground when it comes to high school football. We’re talking about the place where plays are dissected from the previous game, and where the team gets its first look at its upcoming opponent. Each team videotapes its weekly game and teams will then trade film with other teams. The entire process is made easier with the “Hudl” website, which teams upload videos to, allowing them to break down film and share through the site with other teams.
The Indians met on Monday in the computer lab at the high school and the first film they broke down was Friday night’s game film against Mt. Greylock. The team watches every play, many of them multiple times, and Lapointe points out the positives and negatives of each play, such as missed blocks, incorrectly running the plays, and much more. He also points out great plays and what the players do properly.
It’s a great teaching session and the team sits quietly and listens, answering questions when Lapointe asks them. There are also humorous moments, such as when someone gets hit hard, or does something else funny. It keeps the mood light during the two-plus hours the team spends in the film room.
Besides breaking down all the plays, the film allowed everyone to relive one of the greatest high school football finishes in recent memory. As I said, there were all sorts of plays contributing to the win that didn’t make the Saturday game story.
Remember, Turners Falls came out flying and jumped all over Mt. Greylock to the tune of 14-0. Quinn Doyle scored from 3 yards out with 4:23 left in the first quarter to cap a 13-play drive that saw Doyle run for 32 yards on it. The forgotten play on that drive may have been the two-point conversion that saw receiver Nick Croteau run what Lapointe called his “best route of the season” when he gave the Greylock defensive back a great fake like he was running across the middle before cutting out, leaving the defender grasping for air before Brown hit the wide open receiver for the conversion.
That may have seemed inconsequential early in the game, but take this into account — of the eight touchdowns scored in Friday’s game, that was the only successful conversion and accounted for the difference in the final score. The message from Lapointe was clear: Don’t take a play off, because they’re all important. He went on to point out how proud he was of the defense in stopping the Greylock conversion attempts after every touchdown, rather than hanging their collective heads after giving up the score.
The wheels came off the bus in the second quarter for the Indians, when Greylock scored three touchdowns to take a 18-14 halftime lead. The first touchdown came on the Mounties’ only long drive of the quarter, a 66-yard, 11-play drive that included a 25-yard hookup by quarterback Michael Wellspeak to receiver Sean McCormack. It was the first of three catches by McCormack on the night, who caught the eye of everyone, due to his ability to catch balls that appeared uncatchable. Two of his three catches came with defenders draped on him, and there was also a pass that was ruled incomplete that upon review looked like he caught it on a great diving effort.
The other two touchdowns came on a fumbled kick return, and a blocked punt, that left the Mounties with short fields to work with. When Lapointe hit halftime on the film, he had a question for his team.
“Were they leading at halftime because of their play or because of our mistakes?” he asked, before a collective reply of “our mistakes.”
The third quarter of the game was largely uneventful other than an interception by Brown that was called back due to a pass interference penalty. Brown ran the interception back to the Mt. Greylock 30, but the joys turned to groans when the Indians realized the penalty negated the play. At the time, I also missed the penalty, but my photographer Paul Franz told me he saw a Turners Falls defender dive at the receiver prior to the pick, and he thought it was a fair call. The film showed that it was close, but that the call was not egregious.
The fourth quarter was full of action any football fan could appreciate. Greylock took over at its own 38 following a Turners Falls punt with 10:18 to play and put together its second sustained drive of the night, driving the 62 yards in 12 plays, and eating 6 minutes, 27 seconds off the clock. When Devin Pelletier crossed the goal line with 3:51 left, the Mounties had a 24-14 lead.
Brown led the Indians on the ensuing drive to bring the Indians to within four points at 24-20, but there was 2:06 left in the game and it still seemed unlikely that the Indians had enough time to win. The comeback looked even more daunting when Greylock recovered the onside kick and picked up 9 yards on the first two plays of its drive. The Indians had four timeouts when the drive started, so a first down would have allowed the Mounties to take a knee. Facing a third-and-1, it looked like Greylock would do that, but Pelletier was stopped inches from the first-down line on the play, bringing up a fourth-and-inches. Greylock had a decision to make, punt the ball away and leave it in the hands of the defense, or try to convert the fourth down on offense and run out the clock. Greylock elected to go for it and when the quarterback lined up under center, it seemed a foregone conclusion he was going to try to run for it himself. The Indians sold out on defense, with nine of 11 players right up on the line, and Lapointe highlighted the play of his two interior linemen, sophomore Reilan Castine and senior Ricky Smith, on the fourth-down play. The two linemen got low and blew up the play when they stood up the center and allowed the linebackers to penetrate, and Wellspeak actually lost a yard on the play, setting the Indians up on the Greylock 46 with 1:39 to play.
“I knew the game was on the line,” Castine said of the defensive play, “and Smitty and me blew up the center and Tahner (Castine) and Will (Roberge) came in and finished it off.”
The game-winning drive started with a 13-yard run by Brown, who scrambled when he had no options to pass. Three incompletions later, Brown and the Indians faced another decisive moment on a fourth-and-10. The quarterback came through, finding Ricky Craver on a 15-yard pass on which Brown rolled to his left and managed to avoid a defender. A 12-yard pass to Croteau set up first and goal from the 1 with 20 seconds to play. The Indians were out of timeouts at that point and tried to run on first down, but Doyle was thrown for a 1-yard loss, and the Indians had to scramble to get to the line and spike the ball. Lapointe said that over the weekend more than one person he spoke to said they were impressed that the team was able to get to the line and snap the ball without a false start, and that’s what they did, as Brown spiked the ball with 5 seconds left, setting up third down. As they say, the rest is history, as Ortiz got wide open in the back of the end zone on third down and hauled in a pass from Brown, who was rolling left, giving the team and the town reason to celebrate.
I owe Frontier athletic director Marty Sanderson an apology because apparently he has been catching flack from some Frontier fans for something I wrote last week.
When breaking down the new football alignment formula, I discussed the five factors that went into how team placement — urban, cooperative, vocational/technical school, private school and roster size. I mentioned that a number of schools, including Frontier, Turners Falls and Pioneer, did not have the roster size factored in, which would have potentially stopped those three schools from being placed in divisions that were clearly higher than where they belonged. I went so far as to suggest that some schools had not submitted rosters.
What I did not realize about the formula, and the reason why I apologize, is that the size of the roster is only taken into account if a school qualifies in any of the other four categories. Because Frontier, Turners Falls and Pioneer do not qualify in any of those four, their roster was not factored in. Sanderson admitted that the formula does not work, since Frontier is now in the second-highest division in western Mass., but he wanted to clear the air that he did his job.
Oooops. Sorry about that.
Jason Butynski is a Greenfield native and Recorder sportswriter. His email address is jbutynski@recorder.com. Like him on Facebook and leave your feedback at www.facebook.com/jaybutynski.