The Napavine football team suffered its first regular-season loss in over 950 days Saturday in Whatcom County, falling to 1A Lynden Christian 47-6.
“It’s definitely okay to get popped in the mouth once in a while,” Napavine coach Josh Fay said. “But I think we got run over by a car.”
The Tigers (4-1, 1-0 SWW 2B North) trailed 7-6 after a quarter of play, getting on the scoreboard thanks to a 15-yard pass from Ashton Demarest to Karsen Denault. The rest of the way, though, was all Lyncs.
LC — which has made the 1A state semifinals in three of the past five postseasons and spent much of last year as the No. 1 team in the state — tagged Demarest for four interceptions, taking two of them to the house for defensive touchdowns. The Lyncs also recovered a fumble and forced a turnover-on-downs inside the 10-yard line, turning a game in which the Tigers still churned out 261 yards into a blowout.
“We didn’t do ourselves any favors, and when you play a good football team and do that, real bad stuff happens,” Fay said. “Just too many mistakes”
The 41-point margin of defeat is the largest for the Tigers since 2012.
Denault and Cayle Kelly both came down with four receptions, for 58 and 29 yards, respectively. Caleb Von Pressentin led Napavine with 47 rushing yards on five carries.
“We moved the ball really well, at least through the air, had a couple nice routes,” Fay said. “But we just couldn’t finish.”
And the Tigers could do little to stop the Lyncs’ offense, which had three quarterbacks combine to throw for 216 yards on 11 completions, an average of just under 20 yards a pop.
Lynden Christian pushed its lead out to 27-6 at halftime, and started the third quarter like it started the first: with a pick-six.
From there, it was a matter of two more LC touchdowns to get the game to a running clock, the first time that’s happened to Napavine since 2018.
“We just had a hard time executing,” Fay said. “We’re not going to make excuses for why that happened. Hopefully we're going to have the opportunity to learn a little bit from the game, and more, importantly to learn a bit about ourselves.”
Napavine will head back to Lewis County to prepare for its next league matchup, at Morton-White Pass on Friday.
