by Brian Heard
Germantown Gazette
10-11-2006

Even short-handed, Sherwood hands Seneca Valley a loss

Senior quarterback Deontay Twyman was at his gloriously talented best Monday at home against Seneca Valley. But it was the Sherwood High football team’s unheralded, injury-riddled defense that impressed most in a convincing 24-17 victory.

Yes, Twyman slung the ball from sideline to sideline with power and precision, completing 17 of 28 passes for 234 yards and three touchdowns. But a defense missing five starters to injury slowed down Seneca Valley’s prolific, big-play running game, limiting senior tailback Shawn Perry to 101 yards on 21 carries, with only two rushes of over 10 yards. A lot of those yards came after the Warriors had all but sealed the game after taking a 24-3 lead late in the third quarter.

‘‘Yeah, I think it is time the defense got some credit,” senior linebacker⁄tight end Carter Willson said. ‘‘The offense is great, but we’ve been real good on defense too. I think we’ve only been scored on a few times now, so we must be doing something right.”

‘‘We knew they wanted to run the ball,” senior lineman Lamine Diakite added. ‘‘We practiced all week preparing to stop their running game, and we did a good job.”

Sherwood (5-0) stacked its defense, which has given up just 29 points in five games, with 8-9 players within a few yards of the line of scrimmage. And while Seneca (3-2) moved the ball, it did so at a snail’s pace and managed only a field goal in its first six possessions. Perry had a bulls-eye on his jersey, and Sherwood’s defenders were on target, never letting him and his 4.5-second, 40-yard-dash speed wriggle into open territory. It took until his 13th carry of the game to gain double-digit yardage on a run (11 yards). In all, Seneca ran 53 plays from scrimmage, just six went for over 10 yards, only one went for more than 18.

‘‘That’s a well-coached football team,” said Seneca head coach Fred Kim of Sherwood. ‘‘Heck, they’re probably the best-coached team in the state. We knew that coming in. Their players are never out of place, they’re always in the right position to make plays. ... They executed and we didn’t.”

The stingy defense, led by Willson, Diakite, and fellow senior linemen Matt Dawson and Max Chidel, along with junior lineman Sungjoon Ryou, senior linebacker Matt Lopsonzski, junior linebacker Nick Koutsos and sophomore linebacker Steven Gamble, allowed the Warriors’ high-powered offense to work with a safety net.

In the first quarter, Twyman threw his first interception of the year, on a tipped screen pass that Eagles’ senior lineman Donald Langley returned to the Sherwood 20-yard line, setting up a 27-yard field goal by Freddy Santos. But after that Twyman and junior wideout Dominique Budd (9 catches, 135 yards) put on a show. A 55-yard scoring strike by Twyman, after avoiding a heavy rush, to Budd early in the second period gave Sherwood the lead for good at 7-3. The lead grew to 17-3 by halftime after a 23-yard field goal by freshman Brian Lucas and a 33-yard touchdown pass from Twyman to senior wideout C.J. Goode (4 catches, 63 yards).

When Sherwood scored on an 8-yard pass from Twyman to Gamble with 1:50 to play in the third quarter to make it 24-3 the rout seemed to be on. And nobody was more pleasantly surprised with the circumstances then Sherwood head coach Al Thomas, the head coach at Seneca from 1975-87.

‘‘I’ve never been in a game where we were that much of an underdog,” Thomas said. ‘‘I thought they were better than us before we had all the injuries.”

But the Eagles fought back. Perry returned the ensuing kickoff 73 yards to set up Jourdan Brooks’ 2-yatd touchdown run on the first play of the fourth quarter. Then, Seneca put together its best drive of the game after Charles Hobson intercepted a pass from Twyman deep in Seneca territory. The 12-play, 78-yard march culminated in a Perry 6-yard scoring run, cutting the score to 24-17 with just 1:55 to play.

The Eagles did get the ball back with over a minute remaining at their own 26, but could not make any headway and Sherwood held on.

‘‘It’s the same thing we’ve talked about before,” said Kim. ‘‘We continue to shoot ourselves in the foot. We make mistakes, we fumble, we get stupid penalties. And when you do that against a good team like Sherwood, you’re not going to win.”