The back-and-forth brawl that was last year’s matchup on the Black Top between Onalaska and Tenino failed to materialize this time around in Onalaska, as the combination of a bruising Beaver attack and untimely Logger miscues gave Tenino a 40-6 win Friday.
“They’re very well coached, we had to put our best foot forward this week,” Tenino coach Cary Nagel said. “We capitalized off some of their mistakes, but our boys played a very physical football game. The boys are familiar with Onalaska, it was a good challenge for us. The boys responded well.”
The Loggers drove down the field on their opening possession, only to fumble at the goal line. After stopping the Beavers on the ensuing drive, they got the ball back and started to drive again, but once again coughed it up.
Given another shot by its host, Tenino didn’t look back, with Dylan Spicer starting the scoring with a 3-yard touchdown run.
Spicer added a 29-yard score in the third quarter, finishing with 128 yards on 13 carries. Randy Marti added 113 yards of his own; as a team, the Beavers rumbled to 361 yards on the ground.
Onalaska for 122 yards, led by 62 from quarterback Kayden Mozingo – 53 of which came on a long touchdown scamper in the fourth quarter. The Loggers finished with over twice as many first downs as their guests – 35 to 17 – but fumbled it away another time, seeing long drive after long drive stall out in plus territory.
For Loggers coach Mazen Saade, everything in the Loggers’ three-game skid comes back to the basics.
“The game of football is about blocking and tackling, and the team that blocks and tackles the best, at the end of every night, is victorious,” he said. “You’ve got to not want to get blocked when you’re on defense and go make tackles, and when you’re on offense, you’ve got to block people and not want to get tackled. Our program needs to learn how to do those things and improve each week on those things if we want to go where we want to go as a program.”
Tenino (4-0) will enter 1A Evergreen play with a massive test, facing up to 1A No. 2 Eatonville at home next week. Onalaska (1-3, 0-1) will head to Toledo.
