Academy Park’s defense a big hit after a week off in win over Sun Valley
ASTON — In the midseason routine of football, one unplanned week without a game feels like a long time. Just ask Jalen Holman and his Academy Park defensive teammates.
There’s a price to pay, even when they’re your teammates, in playing against that unit. And an extra week of practices, with a little extra intensity and restlessness, that wears thin pretty quick.
“I was tired of hitting my offense,” Holman said. “I’ve been hitting my offense the past two weeks, so I’m ready to hit someone else that I can really go fully out on.”
Holman and the AP defense made that clear against Sun Valley Friday night, even without a couple of starters banged up because of said hitting. Any frustration from last week’s cancelled game against Chichester was channeled efficiently into a 41-6 drubbing of Sun Valley Friday night.
For Academy Park (4-0), that’s four straight games scoring at least 41 points and four straight allowing seven or fewer. It was an easy way to get over the disappointment of having last week’s game against Chichester postponed due to a credible threat against the Southeast Delco School District that caused the school to close Friday and cancel sporting events throughout the weekend.
The Knights have already dealt with a season’s worth of adversity and then some. Their opener against Pennsbury ended with a shooting that left eight-year-old Fanta Bility dead, with a high probability that the bullet came from a police officer’s gun, according to Delaware County district attorney Jack Stollsteimer. Then the threat against the school last week, which wiped out a weekend on the field. It means the likely loss of a Del Val League game if it can’t be rescheduled. Minor bumps and bruises to a few key players, including Bility’s cousin and starting running back Ibrahim Sanogo, that made for a short-handed trip to Aston seem small in comparison.
But nights like Friday make it worthwhile to push through the difficult moments.
“The last couple of weeks have been crazy,” senior Eric Willis said. “We’ve got to come to practice, we’ve got to keep going. You know there’s going to be setbacks for major comebacks. If you keep pushing and keep doing your job, stuff like this happens. We play together.”
I dont know how Eric Willis stayed up on 4th down. But he did. 5 yard TD.
20-0 Knights after failed kick pic.twitter.com/twCkEbCaIO— Matthew De George (@sportsdoctormd) September 24, 2021
Willis played like someone champing at the bit to get a game. He ran for three touchdowns and caught a fourth. He also ran for a pair of two-point conversions and set up a touchdown with a long punt return.
By the end of the first half, Willis had 162 all-purpose yards: 52 rushing, 72 receiving and 38 punt return. Academy Park had 357 yards of offense in the first half on just 29 snaps, though that was slower than the 12-play, 212-yard pace of the opening quarter.
Sun Valley (2-3) trailed by two scores after three AP snaps. Tristan Hodges recovered a fumble on Sun Valley’s second play, one of three lost fumbles to go with an interception hauled in by Anis Hunter in the red zone. Darien Ford took a reverse 44 yards to the one on AP’s first play, then Willis punched it in. He fumbled on that play, with left tackle Nevin Bruton falling on it in the end zone, but Willis appeared to have crossed the plane first, umpire’ beanbag aside.
Terrence Oliver, who has had a half, slips out of the back field for a 19 yard reception to the 4 pic.twitter.com/kZc094cyTo
— Matthew De George (@sportsdoctormd) September 25, 2021
After a Sun Valley 3-and-out, Willis took an inside bubble screen from Darrell Fields 72 yards to the house.
“It sets the tone,” Holman said. “If you go up 14-0, the other team doesn’t want to play. It breaks their spirit. So you’ve just got to keep on going, and that’s why the score was 41-6.”
Sans Sanogo, Terrence Oliver picked up the slack. He carried 14 times for 147 yards, three times setting up goal-to-go situations without scoring.
For all the blowout wins, AP proved clutch on fourth downs Friday, scoring three times that way. Willis dashed in from the five on fourth and goal to make it 20-0, somehow contorting his body to avoid his knee touching the ground. Fields plunged in from the 1 to make it 28-0 with 7:14 left to half. He also slung a 25-yard pass to Ford on fourth-and-4 at the 25 to make it 34-0.
Willis returned a punt from the 11 to midfield with 20 seconds left in the half, with a tack-on horse-collar tackle to set the Knights up at the 36. Fields cashed in, scrambling for 10 yards, hitting Oliver for 19, then Willis took the wildcat snap off right end to tiptoe into the corner and make it 41-0 at the horn.
Sun Valley never got going, limited to 106 yards of offense. Stevie Eskridge completed just one of his first six passes before hitting Jonathan Grayston for an 11-yard TD on fourth down early in the fourth quarter. The normally potent duo of Todd Harper and Andrew Kmett was limited to eight yards on six carries, Holman leading the way with 2.5 tackles for loss.
“It’s hard when we’re trying to overcome that stuff,” said Grayston, who also recovered a fumble forced by Evan Lewis. “We’ve just got to keep on grinding through it. The defense didn’t play up to expectations, but we’ve got to grind through it.”
Fields connected on five of six attempts for 137 yards. Jalen Allen and Uwas Roane also recovered fumbles.
While the wait wasn’t what AP wanted, they proved again Friday that they’re making the most of the time they have on the field.
“We’re just hungry,” Willis said. “We want to play. Especially that week off, we came in even more hungry because we didn’t get to play. Missing a whole week of football, that’s crazy. We wanted to play bad.”
