Pirates fall to Lawrence football
By: Bob Nuse
LAWRENCE Last year, the West Windsor-Plainsboro High South football game played nine games before suffering its first loss.
This year, the Pirates will have to bounce back from their initial defeat much earlier in the season.
The Lawrence offense was in high gear on Saturday and the Pirates’ defense didn’t have any answers as the Cardinals rolled to a 41-21 win in an early showdown for supremacy in the CVC Colonial Division.
With the win, Lawrence improved to 2-0, while the Pirates fell to 1-1. WW-P South will be back in action on Thursday when the Pirates host Hamilton.
The game started well for South, as Stuart Adams had a big return on the opening kickoff and four plays later Ryan Lupo was heading to the end zone. But a holding penalty pushed the Pirates back and that seemed to change the momentum of the game.
"The holding penalty right on the first drive hurt us," South coach Todd Smith said. "We were going in for a score and that backed us right up. But I’ll put this one on the coaching staff. I guess we didn’t prepare our kids well enough. I thought we did a good job all week accounting for certain plays and we tried to put the kids in the right position. We’ll have to go back to the drawing board with tackling. We had them for a loss a couple times and they scooted out.
"We’ll see how our kids react. We’ve got a short week and then we play Hamilton on Thursday."
Lawrence scored on its first two possessions for a 14-0 lead. Lupo, who rushed for 181 yards on 29 carries, then scored to cut the lead to 14-7. But the Lawrence offense could not be stopped and it was 28-7 before Lupo scored the second of his three touchdowns to cut the lead to 28-14.
"It was a combination of things that hurt us," Smith said. "Poor tackling, poor alignment, poor effort. We didn’t play very well on defense. On offense, they took away the fullback (Adams) early on. We don’t have much depth and we want to keep the kids fresh on offense and defense. Stuart was playing pretty good defense for us, so we wanted to keep him fresh. We just didn’t have 11 kids functioning as a whole."
The Pirates got to within 34-21 when Lupo scored in the fourth quarter. But the Cardinals added another touchdown to put the game away. Lupo accounted for most of the WW-P South offense, while quarterbacks Colin Dampier and Connor Farrell combined to complete nine of 24 passes for 138 yards. Andy McKeever was the top receiver with four catches for 59 yards.
"My hat’s off to them," Smith said of the Lawrence effort. "The kid (Jim) Gorski is amazing."
Gorski caught four passes for 145 yards and three touchdowns in the game, while Bayshawn Wells rushed for 67 yards and scored a pair of touchdowns. Overall, the Cardinals finished the game with 483 yards in offense.
"Hopefully we respond and play better against Hamilton," Smith said. "I wish we had a full week to prepare, but we don’t."
And coming back from a loss isn’t something the Pirates have had to prepare for much in the last two seasons.

