Upper Dublin flies past Truman

By Jonathan Vander Lugt

For The Times Herald

UPPER DUBLIN >> Baseball’s trade deadline passed a month and a half ago, but at Upper Dublin, the Stove is just as hot as ever.

The Cardinals’ father-son duo, Bret (head coach) and Ryan (starting quarterback) Stover led the Cards to another rollicking non-conference early-season win on Friday night with the 38-7 pounding they dealt Harry S. Truman.

The latter Stover did much of the work: he tallied 134 (153 if you take out a couple sacks) of the team’s 365 yards on the ground and a pair of scores on 12 carries, highlighted by breakaway scrambles of 60 and 49 yards, showing off a bit of high-end speed.

“He gets it from his mother,” the elder Stover said. “Because he doesn’t get it from me — I’m okay with that.”

It’s hard to imagine that he wouldn’t be.

“He worked on his speed in the offseason,” Bret said, “but he doesn’t get a lot of the props for running it because we don’t run him. It’s there — but we choose not to use that as our first option.”

Believe it or not, despite the fact that they used 11 runners and ran the ball 47 times, running the ball was not the first option Friday night either.

“As big as they were up front,” Stover said, “and athletic as they are, we thought we’d have trouble running the ball.”

So, they tried to pass, were met with solid coverage downfield, and simply took what the defense was giving them.

“They disguised a lot of stuff well,” Ryan Stover said. “They dropped a lot of guys, not rushing much, which opened a lot of running holes.”

“We were running a lot of pass plays that I just took off on because they were so far back,” he said.

“It’s nice, because you can’t just lock in on us,” the elder Stover said. “You’ve got to prepare for the whole offense.”

Kaleif Lee tore through the defense as well, running for 88 and a pair of scores on just 10 carries. He came up lame on Stover’s goal-line score in the third and was pulled, but seemed to be walking fine by the game’s end.

For as good as UD was on offense, Truman was just about as bad. The Tigers accumulated all of 29 yards on offense — a number that UD met three times on single plays — and were plagued by the inability to get any separation in the trenches for the run game, which netted 17 yards. Jordan Freeman had the best day on offense for Truman, with 38 rushing yards on 11 carries.

Field position, among other things, particularly did the Tigs in.

“They’ve got a weapon in their kicker,” Truman coach Jon Craig said. Five times in eight drive did the Tigers start a drive inside their own 20 yard line, compared to Upper Dublin, which started from past their 40 yard line eight out of 11 times.

It was that, and the so-called “little things.”

“We took a knee on a punt on accident (giving the ball inside the Tiger 25 in the second quarter)…it’s stuff like that,” Craig said.

“You can’t do that against a good team and expect to live,” he went on. “We’ve got a lot of work to do, and tomorrow we’ll get right to it.”

Up next for Harry S. Truman is a matchup against Bensalem. Upper Dublin will host Abington in their last non-conference tune-up before taking on Cheltenham the following week to open their Suburban One American play.