By Stephen Ham

Special to the Leader

  The Scarborough Red Storm football team outlasted rival Biddeford to earn a victory, 11-8, last Friday night at Scarborough, in a game that featured turnovers galore, penalties and some solid play.

   This was a huge victory in the end for the Red Storm, as they try to make their presence felt in western Maine Class A football. For the first time since entering Class A in the 2003 season, Scarborough has a winning record, albeit, 1-0. 

  Scarborough has been plagued the past five years by small numbers and teams that were physically small. Second year Head Coach David Sterling saw opportunity in large numbers this year, with more than 60 varsity and JV athletes playing football, and the size of the players has finally caught up to Class A standards. But nothing comes easily to Scarborough football, and such was the case here. 

  Sterling lost his starting quarterback, Junior Blake Brubach, to a wrist injury in a pre-season scrimmage, and was missing mammoth lineman, 6-foot, 7-inch tall, 317-pound Billy Gorman for nearly the entire pre-season as well. Sterling opted to start sophomore quarterback Kyle Kelley, and Kelley rewarded his confidence by playing a steady game, with few miscues given his inexperience.

   Scarborough used a mixture of offensive formations as well as several running backs in order to minimize passing and keep Biddeford guessing, and it worked, mostly, like a charm.

   Asked if his game plan included trying to protect his young quarterback, Sterling said, “We were. We also had field position issues at times. We got backed up in our own end and couldn’t throw the football there, so we tried to respond in the right manner and run the game the way we knew we could.”

   The Storm racked up yardage, sometimes running at will behind a big offensive line that included Gorman, center Luke Bogdanovich, Tyler Millett, Brian Woodbury, and Billy Wahrer. Fullback Peter Tuma and tailback Brendan Ham carried much of the load, with a further wrinkle thrown in when tight end Kris Gergler lined up with Kelley in the shotgun and took some direct snaps with great effect.

   “We had worked on that some this week,” Sterling said. “We put in a change of pace formation by putting in a wide receiver in the quarterback position to try and mix them up. It worked, pretty well.”  

   With Gergler and Tuma running over Biddeford, and Ham slashing through and around, the Storm seemed at times to be in position to pull away to a big victory. But this was Biddeford, and the Tigers live and breathe football.

Biddeford struck first. Quarterback Nate Curran converted on a third and long, and Tyler Parker followed with a plunge for the score. With the two point conversion, Biddeford had the lead 8-0 with 8:21 left in the first quarter.  

Scarborough had several promising drives that stalled due to mistakes, most of them due to game inexperience and first game jitters. Late in the second quarter though, as they began mixing in Tuma and Gergler, the Storm marched to the Biddeford 17 yard line. With 1:35 left in the half, Ham took a handoff on a sweep to the left side and saw a lane open up back toward the center of the field. Ham, a speedster with surprising strength, bolted through the gap, chased by the Biddeford secondary, and scored with a dive over the end zone, putting Scarborough on the scoreboard. Gergler scored on the two-point conversion, tying the score at 8-8.

 The Scarborough win was set up following a bizarre turn of events. Biddeford lofted a desperation pass which was caught by Tyler Parker, who then scampered 30 yards into the end zone seemingly with the go ahead touchdown, with 1:37 remaining in the game. While the Tigers celebrated and Storm players hung their heads, officials huddled around a penalty flag that had been thrown at the beginning of the play. Biddeford was called for illegal procedure, nullifying the touchdown and calling the ball back  for the second time in the game.

Two plays later, with time running out, Red Storm cornerback Sean Northgraves tipped a pass up in the air where safety Garrett Alofs grabbed it and ran 45 yards to the Biddeford 25 yard line. The Tigers were then tagged with an unsportsmanlike penalty and amazingly the Red Storm sat with a first and goal just inside the 10-yard line, with 37 seconds left in the game.

With seven seconds remaining, and the ball on the four yard line, Sterling made the decision to bring in senior Jake Barrett to kick the winning field goal. 

Following the game, Sterling commented on the crazy finish.

“We saw some real good responses to adversity tonight. We had situations where we could have stepped away from the game and let it go, but we stepped up to the challenge and we had a lot of seniors who performed extremely well tonight,” Sterling said. 

Scarborough next plays tonight, Sept. 12, at 7 pm, at Sanford High School.