NAPAVINE – There’s been various lessons the Napavine High School football team has learned through three weeks this fall.
Week 1, the Tigers figured out their season-long potential. Week 2 was a hard-fought lecture on facing a premier team that could find a way to Husky Stadium in three months.
Saturday afternoon may go down as a session involving how to respond when adversity strikes in the blink of an eye.
Behind a furious ground game that built an insurmountable cushion in the opening 24 minutes, Napavine overcame an injury to senior Cayle Kelly and moved to 2-1 with a 55-24 victory over Cedar Park Christian in its home opener and penultimate non-league affair.
“We took advantage of numbers in the box,” Tigers head coach Josh Fay said. “I liked the way we established things in the trenches. There’s a lot of good stuff in there.”
Holes were being established by a veteran offensive line with three starters back and two sophomores learning by live reps. Kelly kickstarted the explosion with a 20-yard scamper in the first quarter, one of two touchdowns he had in the first half.
Quarterback Grady Wilson, in his first season as the starter after winning the competition in fall camp, added a pair of touchdowns on the ground.
The junior finished with 90 rushing yards and 110 through the air. He found Karsen Denault on a 27-yard touchdown throw in the back corner to push the lead to 42-7 at the half.
“Come out on fire,” Wilson said.
The back-and-forth between Wilson and sophomore Beckett Landram was a storyline in camp to see who would take over for star Ashton Demarest. Wilson believes it made both of them better for it.
Still, he understands complacency can’t happen in practice or games.
“Any of these days I have a couple bad practices, then a bad game, there’s a guy behind me that can do just as good if not a better job,” he said. “I gotta stay on it and keep myself focused.”
Denault added a one-handed interception, a 73-yard punt return for six and a 60-yard onside kick return for a score as the dagger to a performance that had over 180 all-purpose yards. Caleb Von Pressentin gashed the Eagles with 156 rushing yards, 65 of them on the first play from scrimmage in the third stanza to enact the running clock.
Napavine finished with 326 yards on the ground for the afternoon.
“He’s a special athlete, he showed that tonight,” Fay said of Denault. “I bet they wish they hadn’t onside kicked (towards) him.”
Napavine’s energy bubble burst when Kelly went down with an injury in the second stanza and hobbled off the field with no pressure on his right leg. Fay stated it is a “sideways” thumb on initial worry about his starting tailback.
Kelly will be evaluated on Monday to determine the timeline, per Fay.
“He is the straw that stirs the drink,” Fay stated. “You can see when he came out, that we were just flat.”
Four fumbles, three of them lost and one that went for a defensive score, were errors the Tigers made. The passing game of Cedar Park Christian started to connect in the third and fourth quarters that made the final score a touch closer.
At one point, the Eagles had possession for 11 minutes, 40 seconds in the third even with a running clock.
“It has got to be a lot better,” Wilson said. “Rather have something like that happen in a game where we do have a lead than a game that is tight.”
The running defense the Tigers unleashed put an even more emphasis on defending the pass. They limited Cedar Park Christian’s Lyal Viers to eight rushes for seven yards and the team as a whole to 10 net yards.
“We figured it would be 70/30 (passing), but it was probably 80/20 so we expected that,” Fay said. “We did some different coverage things, new implementations this week. I thought our kids did a pretty good job for the most part.”
The last non-league contest against Class 1A Montesano is on the road next Friday before C2BL divisional play opens in Week 5 for Napavine against arch rival Adna.
Even if Kelly misses time, Fay has been proud of the fight his group is showing with 33 percent of the season in the books.
“I like the way we’re trending,” Fay said. “It is going to come down to execution. Some people thought we were going to be middle of the road. We’re here to play too.”
