Cass City Chases History in Rematch
By
Paul Costanzo
Special for MHSAA.com
November 8, 2019
Sandyn Cuthrell and his Cass City teammates have a simple way to make sure they are properly prepared for each game – treat every week like it’s Laker week.
As they prepare for their District Final, the Red Hawks won’t have to pretend, as for the second time this season, it’s actually Laker week.
The Red Hawks will host archrival Elkton-Pigeon-Bay Port Laker at 7 p.m. Friday for the Division 7 Region 4, District 1 championship. The winner will advance to the Regional Final against either Madison Heights Madison or Detroit Loyola.
The win-or-go-home nature of the postseason adds more to this rivalry game, but it’s also a chance at some program firsts for the Red Hawks. A win would give them their first ever District championship and first ever 10-win season.
“This one, it’s probably the biggest game in Cass City history,” said Cuthrell, a four-year starter at quarterback for the Red Hawks. “We’re not going to let it be ruined.”
Plenty is on the line, but what the Red Hawks have accomplished to this point already puts them among the best teams in school history.
Cass City won nine straight games after a season-opening 16-14 loss against Montrose – a team that is still alive in the Division 6 playoffs – and won the Greater Thumb Conference West for the second straight season.
It has also allowed 50 points. Total. All season.
“We’re not like huge; we’re all just super fast,” said Cuthrell, who also plays defensive back. “All these years building up to this year, we’ve been really heavy on the weight room every year. We’re all not huge guys, but we’re all really quick and fast. We can swarm to the ball, and there’s not a lot of big plays that can happen when the defensive backs are quicker than the receivers.”
Outside of the Montrose game, the Red Hawks haven’t allowed more than eight points in a game this season and had four shutouts. During six conference games, they allowed a total of 22 points. It’s the program’s best defensive performance since the 1950s.
“Coach does a really good job preparing us throughout the week,” junior running back and linebacker Alex Perry said. “We’ve been able to communicate with each other really well. The line gets a good push, so the linebackers can come in and clean it up. And the defensive backs shut down the pass.”
The offense has done its fair share, as well, averaging 40.1 points per game despite scoring just 14 in Week 1. So, while the defense’s numbers are eye-popping, most of the season has seen the Red Hawks be dominant in all phases.
“When you coach this long, hopefully you come across a team that gels really well, and that’s what happened this year,” Cass City coach Scott Cuthrell said. “We have a good group of kids, and they all get along really well on and off the field, and they all have a common goal. This is a group of kids that I’ve enjoyed going to coach every night.”
Players vouch for the camaraderie on and off the field and cited that as a main reason this year’s team has been special and capable of doing what no team at Cass City has ever done.
“We’re more than a team. We hang out all the time,” Perry said. “This year, we just flow and really mesh together.”
Perhaps at no time this season did the Red Hawks mesh together as well as they did the first time they lined up against Laker. A 51-0 win in Week 4 marked the second-straight year Cass City had defeated its rival, but prior to the 2018 win, Laker had won nine straight in the series.
“Last season’s win meant a lot to us,” senior halfback and cornerback Hadyn Horne said. “We’re 10 minutes apart, and it’s just a battle for our area. It’s always been a really big game around here, probably the biggest game in the Greater Thumb Conference. We know in the playoffs it’s pretty much like coming in with a 0-0 record. They’re going to be a lot better than what they were when we played them the first time. Obviously we beat them bad last time, but it’s all about who wants it more.”
The two teams have met twice in a District Final (2014 and 2017). Some of the current players were on the field for the 2017 loss, including Sandyn Cuthrell, who said it was “like getting stabbed in the heart.”
Not wanting to have that feeling again is quite the motivation, but so is making program history.
“That would mean a lot,” Horne said. “I think down the road, I’ll look back at that and know, ‘That was our team that did that.’”
Paul Costanzo served as a sportswriter at The Port Huron Times Herald from 2006-15, including three years as lead sportswriter, and prior to that as sports editor at the Hillsdale Daily News from 2005-06. He can be reached at [email protected] with story ideas for Genesee, Lapeer, St. Clair, Sanilac, Huron, Tuscola, Saginaw, Bay, Arenac, Midland and Gladwin counties.
PHOTOS: (Top) Cass City defenders including Alex Perry (44) pursue the Laker quarterback during this season’s first game against their rival. (Middle) Sandyn Cuthrell (6) breaks through the line for the Red Hawks. (Photos courtesy of the Cass City athletic department.)
Unbeaten Morrice Caps Remarkable Run
November 17, 2018
By Geoff Kimmerly
Second Half editor
MARQUETTE – Hunter Nowak finished his high school career Saturday at Northern Michigan University’s Superior Dome as arguably the most accomplished offensive star in Morrice football history.
But he’d be the first to point out that the Orioles put the finishing touch on their first perfect and championship season because of the effort on the other side of the ball as well.
Nowak capped a three-year varsity campaign rushing 39 times for 199 yards and three touchdowns and throwing for another score as Morrice broke away for a 44-16 win over Pickford to claim the 8-Player Division 1 championship – the Orioles’ first state title in this sport. They also finished 13-0.
And his defense played a big part in making that possible, locking down a Panthers offense that entered the Final averaging 54 points per game and also unbeaten.
“I told them before, going in, ‘Boys, this is your last game. Just sell out,’” Morrice senior linebacker/fullback Connor Lucas said. “’Leave it all on the field. Do not regret it.’
“When we did the (coin) toss, and they said they wanted to receive, we were actually more happy that they wanted to receive because we knew our defense could shut them down.”
Defense has not been a hallmark of the first decade of 8-player football in Michigan. But Morrice seemed to figure it out this fall.
The Orioles gave up 78 points – a mere six per game – and from mid-September through the first week of the playoffs posted six straight shutouts.
Morrice gave up a respectable 21 points per game in going 9-2 in 2017, playing a basic 4-4 scheme. But leading tackler Lucas said this season the defense rotated through about 20 formations.
Pickford’s lowest point total this fall had been 38 points in a Week 3 win over Crystal Falls Forest Park.
“They were quick, they were strong … they were aggressive,” said Pickford junior quarterback Jimmy Storey, who went over 1,000 yards rushing for the season with 92 Saturday, but completed only 4 of 17 passes. “They were really aggressive and tough, and gave us a run for our money.”
Pickford junior running back Stephen LaMothe opened the scoring with a 14-yard run only 2:39 into the game.
But Nowak followed with 45 and 4-yard touchdown runs and a 15-yard scoring pass to senior Austin Edington to take a 22-8 lead into the break. “Going into the locker room at halftime, and we were up, we could definitely tell they were kinda surprised,” Lucas said.
Nowak opened the second half with another scoring run. LaMothe – who finished with 99 yards rushing on 14 carries – broke a 60-yarder at the end of the third quarter to make the score 30-16. But Edington pulled the Orioles away with 54 and 6-yard scoring runs in the fourth quarter.
Edington finished with 122 yards rushing on 10 carries as the team ran for 317 of its 353 yards total.
“Once we started the game, started gaining a little momentum, we could see some of our run plays were working better than what we thought they (would),” Morrice coach Kendall Crockett said. “We were moving the bigger men on the other team, and Hunter just made the lanes work, and Austin, and Connor was blocking and the plays work. When you design them, and they work in a game, it’s fun to watch.”
Crockett took over the program five seasons ago when Morrice switched from 11-player, and brought to the gameplan some of the spread scheme from his time as an assistant at DeWitt. “When I took over the job in 8-man football, I didn’t have a clue what I was doing,” he said. “I looked to some of the more experienced coaches – Rob McDaniel from Peck, Deckerville, you look to those different coaches to find out what worked for them. We tried their stuff, and that’s when we decided we had to go our own way and see what works for Morrice.
“We came up with the system we have today, and you know what – speed, especially out here, speed hurts.”
Morrice’s previous longest playoff run was to the Class D Semifinals in 1996. The Orioles went 9-2 three seasons ago but fell back to 4-5 in 2016 before starting a two-year climb to history.
“We’ve been dreaming of this since we were in third grade playing together,” Nowak said. “Our sophomore year, things didn’t go right. Last year we made the playoffs, we didn’t do too well. But we knew this year was the year to do it. We played every game super hard, went undefeated – just everything worked out.”
Pickford capped its third straight season of making the Semifinals with its first trip to a championship game. The Panthers will graduate just two of 18 players on Saturday’s roster. Crockett said he saw in the Panthers’ junior class the potential to do what his seniors accomplished this fall.
Senior Chase Warner had 12 tackles for Pickford, while Storey and junior Isaiah May both had 10. Senior Beau Dietz had 10 tackles to lead Morrice.
“We’re going to have to remember it, and work that much harder in the offseason,” Storey said. “We gotta come back next year and get it.”
PHOTOS: (Top) Morrice’s Austin Edington dives for the end zone for one of his three touchdowns Saturday at the Superior Dome. (Middle) The Orioles’ Hunter Nowak breaks past a Pickford defender. (Photos by Cara Kamps.)