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South Elgin's defense shines again

Our area may not be dealing with a hurricane like our friends on the East coast, but there was a Storm Surge of another kind on Friday night at Millenium Field in Streamwood.

While its hard to top 3 straight shutouts the South Elgin defense managed to outdue itself with its most dominating performance yet. The vaunted "Storm Surge" defense rushed to the ball in waves and allowed just 16 yards of total offense to the host Sabres while recording a fourth straight shutout in 55-0 Upstate Eight Conference win.

"I love the intensity our defense is playing with right now," South Elgin coach Dragon Teonic said. "We are just flying to the ball and these guys just keep working hard every week to keep getting better."

The Storm defense stopped the Sabres 12 times behind the line of scrimmage for losses and recorded 3 turnovers. Senior defensive back Pat Noworol once again spearheaded the defensive effort. He had a pick-6 on a 32-yard return for touchdown on an interception late in the second quarter.

"Our goal is shutout our opponents every week," Noworol said. "Are speed is our best weapon. The whole team just tries to get to the ball as fast as we can. The defensive linemen, the linebackers, the DBs are all fast."

The Storm running game struggled in the first half with just 45 yards on the ground and South Elgin led just 6-0 with a little under 4:00 left before exploding for 3 touchdowns in closing minutes of the first half.

South Elgin quarterback Jakob Johnson orchestrated a 59-yard touchdown drive with completions of 38, 12, and 15 yards. Then scored on a 12-yard run to make it 13-0. Moments later Noworol scored on his pick-6. The Storm scored again just before half when they got the ball at the 3-yard line following a fumbled punt attempt by the Sabres and a 4-yard touchdown pass by Johnson to Calin Gurau.

Johnson added a 1-yard touchdown run in the second half. He finished with 10 completions on 13 attempts for 158 yards.

"It was good to see the passing game sharper tonight," Teonic said. "It's some thing we've been wanting to work in more."

Despite the early success and a 4-0 start there are some chinks in the the armor. Teonic continues to be concerned about the team's propensity for penalties. They were flagged 7 times.

"We have had 5 touchdowns called back because of penalties this year," Teonic said. "We are just committing way too many. We can't go around thinking we are a great team just because we are 4-0 because we are not great. We still have a lot of things to clean up."

Davion Cherwin added a 10-yard touchdown run for the Storm. Shiking Marshall had a 17-yard touchdown run and Travis Tranchitella had one for 31 yards.

Streamwood falls to 0-4.

"We are still playing with every thing we got," Streamwood coach Don Guindon said. "We just ran into a real good team tonight."

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