The Estevan Comprehensive School Elecs football team had a rough start to the game, a pretty good middle, and then a seemingly long hill to climb by the end.
The Elecs (1-4) lost 64-16 against Moose Jaw Central Cyclones (4-1) at Moose Jaw Thursday afternoon in Moose Jaw High School Football League action, getting in the game just before snow hit the region.
“We didn’t really do ourselves any favours at the start of the game,” said Elecs head coach Mark Schott.
ECS elected to receive the kickoff at the start of the game but the ball was stripped from Colten Kolakowski and landed on by Central. One quick pass from Central quarterback Ethan Johnson and Central were in business. The Elecs’ first offensive series from scrimmage featured a penalty and a quarterback sack before ECS conceded a safety to earn Central a very fast 9-0 lead.
“That first half, eventually we started to get some things going on offence and move the ball a little bit,” Schott said. “The defence came up with some big plays and got some knockdowns. We had a couple of coverage breakdowns on defence.”
Due to penalties, Central had seven or eight chances to hit the end zone inside the 20-yard line and, of course, they did just that.
“That’s a tall order for a defence to stop a high powered offence eight times, that close to the end zone,” said Schott. “I think we can take away that there were some successes there and we need to get our offence back onto the practice field and work on some timing.”
Schott feels they need to have some plays at the ready for when their quarterback has to get rid of the ball quick.
That quarterback Thursday was last year’s starter Rylan Erdelyan, in for an injured Kaleb Bechtold.
“Rylan has some experience there… and we just need him to settle in and lead the charge with the rest of the offensive group.”
Erdelyan went 11-for-21 for 146 yards with one touchdown – to Jonah Bachorcik in the first quarter – and two interceptions. Bachorcik caught four passes for 103 yards in the game.
It was a no-huddle offence that the Elecs hadn’t tried yet this year that occasionally put Central on their heels in the second quarter.
“There was definitely some success there,” said Schott. “I think our offence had some buy in with that system in and we were able to catch Central a little off-guard and move the ball decent with that.”
Schott said Erdeyan would have wanted to have a bit better timing on some of the passes that fell close to but not quite in the hands of the receivers.
After the Elecs went down 29-8 at the half, Central scored 21 points in the third quarter and
While the game was in advance of the wet snowfall that blanketed southern Saskatchewan, it was also just before a record fell. Central’s Johnson now sits 147 yards behind Sawyer Buettner’s league record for single season passing at 1,686 yards.
The task doesn’t get any easier with the Elecs’ next and final regular season opponent being the Yorkton Raiders (5-0) Tuesday. They’ll follow that with the first round of the playoffs, which will likely be against Swift Current (4-2)
