Medford makes some plays, but not enough of them in shortened game

AMHERST 29, MEDFORD 14

There was too much lightning in the sky to get a full game in and too many quick strikes by Amherst on the field Friday when the Falcons fled Medford with a 29-14 win in what wound up being just over a 25-minute game.

The teams got to halftime in the nick of time as storm clouds and lightning bolts arrived from the south and forced the teams into the school locker rooms and the band off the field with Amherst leading 29-8.

The game resumed just after 9 p.m. and the Raiders delivered a big strike of their own on the third play from scrimmage on an 82-yard catch and run by Caleb Guden, who caught a bomb from Logan Baumgartner 40 yards downfield and outran the defense for 42 more.

But three plays into Amherst’s next drive, with just 1:18 elapsed in the third quarter, the next storm rolled into town and the game was called. Medford head coach Ted Wilson said the Raiders were more than willing to wait it out or try to finish the game on Saturday, but those feelings weren’t mutual.

“Very frustrating,” Medford head coach Ted Wilson said. “We need to play football. We want to play football. It’s not good for our program to miss out on a half of football.”

As expected, the football that was played offered more tough lessons for Medford’s inexperienced squad, which made some gains, but also was exposed at times by a squad that has high aspirations for November, and rightfully so, in its division.

“We definitely got a little bit better, but we definitely have more steps we need to take,” Wilson said.

The Raiders open Great Northern Conference play Friday when they host Ashland at 7 p.m.

Amherst ran a fake reverse on the opening kickoff and Jake Hoffman sprung a 36-yard return that put the ball a yard shy of midfield. The Falcons needed 10 plays to cover 51 yards and score the game’s first points on a 2-yard drive up the middle by quarterback Landon Moe.

Medford got a first down and then was stopped on fourth and one at its own 45, but the defense came up with its biggest play of the short night when Kolton Ratcliff chased down Moe, got the sack and knocked the football free. Guden recovered at Amherst’s 42.

The Raiders needed a pass interference penalty on fourth down to keep the

Amherst 29, Medford 14

drive alive, but they gladly took advantage when Aiden Gardner broke through a hole created by the right side of the offensive line, broke a tackle at the 15 and scored from 26 yards out. He added the two-point conversion to give Medford its first lead of the season, 8-7, with 3:53 left in the opening quarter.

“It was a nice little cut by Aiden,” Wilson said. “Those are going to happen for him. He’s got good vision. What we need to work is not getting zero yards. We need to work on getting 3-4 yards when we run the ball, especially against good teams. We have to quit getting zeros and we have to start getting threes and fours and then bust the big ones.”

The lead lasted only 17 seconds.

Amherst again faked the reverse on the kick return and, this time, Matthew Godowski got through a hole on the left side and scampered 70 yards to Medford’s 14. Hoffman scored on the next play and ran in the two-pointer to put Amherst right back on top 15-8.

“That’s just some of our youth getting the better of us, not really paying attention to what else is going on on the field, just kind of looking at the two guys crossing,” Wilson said of Amherst’s two big returns in the first half. “We’ve seen it now. We’ve talked about it. We’ll practice it and we’ll make sure we shore it up. Kids sometimes have to see things in real time for them to kind of wrap their heads around them.”

Medford’s Seth Mudgett recovered a Hoffman fumble later in the quarter at Amherst’s 47. The Raiders drove to Amherst’s six, but a fumbled exchange was recovered by Amherst’s Jake Derezinski. The Falcons drove 94 yards in 14 plays, highlighted by a 34-yard completion from Moe to Ian Hall, and scored on Moe’s 3-yard run to go up 22-8 with 3:49 left in the half.

The backbreaker came on Amherst’s next offensive play, when Moe hit Hall with a perfectly-thrown ball along the right sidelines. The 78-yard touchdown gave Amherst a commanding 21-point lead with 1:31 left in the half.

The Raiders gave themselves a chance to get back in it on a gorgeous 44-yard yard dart thrown by Baumgartner to Cole Dassow. Dassow, however, was just barely tripped up on the play at the 20-yard line. The Raiders got to the two before back-to-back sacks in the final seconds, lost 21 yards and kept the Raiders down by 21.

The long score to Guden followed a botched snap that resulted in an 11-yard loss. On third and 21, Baumgartner avoided a sack inside the 10, stepped up and heaved the ball to Guden, who caught the ball in traffic, spun to his right and was gone.

“It’s always nice to get big plays,” Wilson said. “Part of that though is we have to do a better job of not just relying on those. We have to do a little bit better

job of sustaining drives, blocking and getting off the ball. We’re just not going forward enough on either side of the ball on the offensive or defensive lines. We’ll just keep working on it.”

Medford finished with 207 yards of total offense, with the three big losses late knocking down that total. Baumgartner was six of 12 for 166 yards. Guden had three catches for 107 yards. Tukker Schreiner powered for 32 tough yards on eight carries.

The Falcons had 269 yards with a nice balance of 137 rushing yards and 132

MATT FREY/THE STAR NEWS

passing yards.

“They do a great job. They’re very well coached,” Wilson said. “We didn’t play overly well defensively. In an offense like that, they are so precise with where they go and how they run it. It’s tough to simulate that in practice.

“It was a little tough on our linebackers,” Wilson said. “They’ll get it figured out. We’ll go back to our rules, like what shoulder we need to keep free in scraping over and how we fill. Just keep working to get better.”

Medford’s Tukker Schreiner runs through this tackle attempt by Amherst’s Aidan Jastromski and gains 15 yards on this first-quarter carry.

MATT FREY/THE STAR NEWS