Freehold has early showdown with Shore Saturday
Colonials off to a 2-0 start for the new season
It’s still September and still very early in the scholastic football season. However, it’s not too early to play a big football game and that is what Larry Boice’s Freehold Borough Colonials are bracing for Saturday afternoon when they tackle the Shore Regional Blue Devils in Freehold.
Freehold Borough, at 2-0, is off to its best start in years. A win at Shore Regional will put the team in a strong position in the Shore Conference National Division. The Colonials are already the only team in the division with an unblemished record.
Shore, 2-1, shook things up its opening weekend when the Blue Devils upset last year’s division and Central Jersey Group I state sectional champions, Keyport, 17-14. Shore lost its chance to take charge of the division the following week when Colts Neck upended it 20-16 on Jesse Stoop’s 65-yard touchdown run in the fourth quarter. Shore must beat Freehold Friday night to have any chance of claiming at least a share of the division title.
The Colonials had their bye weekend this week, but it didn’t mean they didn’t play a game last week. Because of the Sept. 14 National Day of Mourning, their game with Holmdel was pushed back to Monday, Sept. 17, and the venue was switched to Holmdel.
On a hot summer day that was more suitable for baseball, Freehold Borough and Holmdel plodded up and down the field, playing to a scoreless tie through three quarters. The Hornets had no sting in their offense as the Colonials’ defense seized the initiative from the start. Freehold Borough could move the ball, but it seemed that every positive play resulted in a yellow flag flying to the turf.
It was a game in which both teams were waiting for something to happen and finally, in the final quarter, it did. On the second play of the fourth quarter, quarterback Bret Jones hooked up with Lateef Shuler on a 70-yard pass play that put the ball on the Holmdel 20 and took the Colonials out of trouble at the same time. Freehold was facing a second and 20 from its own 10 when Jones looked deep to Shuler on a fly pattern down the right sideline. Shuler hauled the pass in and ran it down to the 20. On the next play, Damian Walcott swept around the left side of the line and sprinted into the end zone with the first score of the game. It would not be his or the team’s last.
Jones to Shuler had stunned the Hornets and they would not recover.
On Holmdel’s very next possession following Walcott’s TD, Jesse Rudman stepped in front of a pass from Hornet quarterback Lou D’Avanzo and raced 38 yards untouched into the end zone for the score that really broke the Hornets back, and their will.
Walcott, the Colonials’ sophomore back who ran for 100 yards in his varsity debut, was darting and spinning his way through the Hornet line, shaking off one tackler after another throughout the game.