Friday night the Demon offense ran through the Mid-Prairie defense and mother nature, posting a 35-14 win in Wellman. From the opening kick Washington made a concerted effort to pound the ball with Alex Coker and Daryn Seibelius and it paid off with a first drive touchdown when Alex Coker plunged in from one yard out to make it 7-0 midway through the first quarter. Washington doubled the lead to 14-0 seven minutes later when Seibelius finished a six play 80 yard drive with an 11 yard touchdown run.
The Golden Hawks showed life in the second quarter getting within 14-7 when they finished a five play 76 yard drive with a highlight reel 26 yard touchdown run from Reid Miller around left end. After the game Mid-Prairie Head Coach Pete Cavanagh talked about his team’s first touchdown and their defensive effort.
“Not as consistent as we want to be, but you’re right we made a good scoring drive there Zach made a good catch and Reid made a good throw and was able to get down the sideline and kind of worked better, and we had a little momentum and Reid made a nice scramble down the sideline and was able to get in, and at that point we were feeling pretty good, we just had to shore up our defense a little bit, and the second quarter kind of got away from us and we gave up two scores there and that really turned out to be the momentum shift that really hurt us,” Cavanagh said. “I think they were 7-12 in the third down conversions,when you’re over 50 percent, you can’t do that, you have to force them to punt the ball, whether it was a missed tackle or they had a nice run, you have to change the possession and get your offense the ball.”
Faced with their first adversity of the night Washington answered right back with an impressive, punishing 14 play 80 yard drive, all on the ground with Carl Sivels diving in from two yards out running the score to 21-7. Mid-Prairie was unable to move the ball right before halftime and Washington capitalized. Coker began the drive with a 34 yard punt return and finished it with his second short touchdown run of the night pushing the score to 28-7 at half. After the game Demon Head Coach Randy Schrader talked about the importance of the final score of the half.
“That was big for us, we talked about how we needed to stop them, so we can get out of half time with just the seven we gave up there and we did sot that was big and in the red zone we converted tonight, we did a nice job and made some adjustments and did some things there,” Schrader said. “This is a great rivalry coach Cavanagh does a great job with his kids and it was a clean football game, in terms of there were no unsportsmanlike penalties, there wasn’t a lot of jawing, it was just kids coming out and playing hard.”
The second half saw both teams defenses step up and limit scoring in the third quarter. Washington enjoyed their largest lead of the night at 35-7 in the fourth quarter when Carl Sivels capped an 11 play 54 yard drive with his second rushing score of the night. Mid-Prairie’s final points came on a late 75 yard touchdown run from Austin Slabaugh.
The Demons dominated the stat sheet running 62 total rushing plays and racking up more than 360 yards on the ground led by Coker who was over the 100 yard mark at halftime. He ended with 120 yards on 20 carries. Seibelius finished with more than 110 rushing yards to his credit. The Demons were an impressive seven of 12 in third down conversions on the night and scored touchdowns on all five of their redzone chances in the game. Mid-Prairie was led offensively by Slabaugh’s 95 yards rushing with a score, Zach Schwartz had four catches for 75 to lead all Golden Hawk receivers including a 55 run and catch. Washington is now 1-0 on the season and will wrap up the predistrict portion of the schedule next week at Case Field against top 10 Pella. Mid-Prairie is 0-1 on the year and will travel to Clear Creek Amana next Friday.