by Tom Condardo
During the course of every football season there comes a time - a game or even a play - where a team reaches a turning point. And it can go either way - turning for the worse when a team realizes it just doesn't have the horses and they're in for a long season. Or it can turn for the better, where the things the coaches have been ramming into their heads for weeks finally takes root and shows results.
Yes Ipswich is definitely offensively-challenged, as evidenced by their starting a freshman quarterback. And they only have one real offensive weapon in Charlie Gillis, but on the defensive side of the ball, they are the real deal.
This is a team that beat Newburyport 12-6 - the same Clipper team that hung 32 points on the Pioneers on opening night. They hung with North Reading, a team with a dangerous attack, before falling 21-13. They gave Triton a battle before finally succumbing to a team that is currently number one in the Division 3 power rankings.
The defensive effort - holding them to 28 yards and zero first downs - for the 40 minutes both varsity squads were on the field was truly impressive. What is just has important is the way the Pioneers moved the ball against a very good defense. They went for over 300 yards - 232 on the ground - led by some bruising running by Anthony Murphy who rolled for 114 yards on 12 carries.
The game remained in doubt until the fourth quarter mainly because the Pioneers couldn't cash in on three early opportunities when they drove inside the Tiger 25 - once to the 16 and once to the six - but couldn't convert on fourth down. The Pioneers could have cracked the 30 point mark if they had converted a couple of those chances.
But the missed opportunities didn't come back to haunt them and they notched the win. It was an important victory because it give the Pioneers a leg up on the Tigers both in the CAL Baker League race and the D3A power rankings.
I asked head coach Neal Weidman after the game if they had made any changes scheme or personnel wise that led to the much improved performance.
"No it was probably a combination of maybe a good matchup for us - sometimes you match up with some teams differently than you match up with other teams," he said, "and the fact that the kids are starting to grasp it a little bit. They are starting to execute and a little less of doing their own thing.
"We knew it was going to be a process this year," he went on. "Hopefully we can continue to move forward. The mistakes are becoming less and less. We're still committing penalties thart are backing us up offensively but we're playing much cleaner. The first game was absolute chaos and hectic. We were playing a hundred miles an hour and not going anywhere. We definitely had some improvement. I was hoping for it to come a little bit faster than it's been bit I think we're inching our way there."
The task for Weidman and his staff is to make sure the team sees the win as a turning point, not an end point. He talked to me about that after the game.
"We have to guard against thinking that we're good," he said. "We have to realize we've played better the last two weeks and got two wins because we came out with some focus and we wanted to do well. They can't forget that and come to practice and think now all of a sudden we know what we're doing."
Copy Cats
The Tigers may have been watching too much film in preparing for the Pioneers and got a bit fooled by what they saw. They have been running out of the spread with sophomore Ben Yanakakis at quarterback. On Friday, they started freshman Nick Sotiropoulos at quarterback running out of the I formation with Charlie Gillis as the feature back.
"The did run some I," Weidman said. "I think they thought they might want to get downhill on us since some teams had some success doing that. They're searching a bit offensively. They tried it and our defense stepped up."
You couldn't blame the Tigers. Their only real offensive threat is Gillis, and if they watched the Danvers and Amesbury films they saw Matt Andreas of the Falcons and Zach Prentiss of the Indians rip through the Pioneers for over 150 yards each. The Pioneer front seven was much tighter against Gillis and the plan didn't quite work out. Gillis finished with 21 yards on 12 carries. The Tigers eventually went back to the spread with Yanakakis, but the results were pretty much the same.
Triple Threat
Quarterback Matt Mortellite pulled off a triple play by throwing a TD pass (3 yarder to captain Kyle Hawes), running for a score (22 yard scamper) and tossing a two point conversion to Anthony Murphy. The last Pioneer quarterback to pull that off was Danny Sullivan who did it in 2014 against Winthrop.
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