It's 9-0 for CL South
It has been 17 years since Crystal Lake South won its last Fox Valley Conference football championship. Most of the players were infants or toddlers at the time. You have to go back to 1984 for the Gators' last outright conference championship and no Gator football squad had been undefeated in school history.
That's now all erased from the record book.
With South's 48-21 Fox Valley Conference Valley Division win at Ken Bruhn Field Friday night over McHenry, the Gators grabbed not only the outright FVC Valley Division title, they're undefeated for the first time and coach Chuck Ahsmann had only one word to sum it all up:
“Relief,” Ahsmann said. “It's just a long season and you play a lot of tough teams; it's hard to go 1-0 every week and these guys did it and it's a tribute to them.”
“It's amazing,” Gators quarterback Drew Ormseth said. “Our first goal was to get conference. I guess 9-0 was the gravy on top of it.”
South (9-0, 5-0) could have just packed it in for the playoffs after its win against Cary-Grove last week, but the Gators knew McHenry (1-8, 1-4) could score with its prolific passing game that they couldn't underrate.
“They run an offense that you don't see very often,” Ahsmann said of the hurry-up spread offense. “They have three really good receivers and a really good quarterback (Robert Tonyan) and that's hard to come across in high school most of the time.”
Tonyan was indeed good. He passed 57 times, completed 36 and threw for 418 yards. But McHenry had only 21 points to show for the 83 plays it ran because South got stops when needed.
Twice South stalled Warrior drives, on the CLS 22 and 19 in the second quarter, by batting away Tonyan's throws each on fourth down. One drive was snuffed out by Brad Walovitch's interception with 16 seconds left in the first half at the McHenry 5. McHenry's onside kick recovery on the halftime kickoff parlayed to a 7-play 48-yard drive capped by Tonyan's 19-yard pass to Trevor Jones. Though, the 27 point hole was just too much. South intercepted Tonyan twice, allowed 65 yards rushing and two other scores in the fourth.
“I really thought our starters did a good job,” Ahsmann said. “They scored the other 14 points against our JV team. We had a breakdown here and there when you have a good quarterback and receivers like that. Defensively I was pretty satisfied actually with the way they played.”
The Gator offense looked good as usual. Running back Bolek Mikulec got minimal touches running the ball, but did not have his usual workload (5 rushes, 37 yards, 9-yard TD run). Ormseth and Kenny King picked up the slack. Ormseth threw for 198 yards and 2 touchdowns, rushed for 147 yards and 2 touchdowns, from 34 and 75 yards out, and hooked up with King on South's first play for an 83-yard touchdown pass. King caught 3 passes for 110 yards.
“Drew just made a good throw,” King said. “It's good that we come out fast. We still need to work on taking that more into the second half than we usually do.”
South ran 29 plays for 492 yards and scored on 5 of its 6 first half drives. Kean Loupee added a 34-yard score filling in for Mikulec. Steve Forner's 8-yard score plus Mikulec and Ormseth's runs had South up 34-0 at halftime. Walovitch added a 73-yard TD reception in the third quarter.
McHenry's Corey Szamlewski caught 8 passes for 168 yards. Jimmy Preston hailed 2 touchdowns on 76 yards receiving.