COLORADO SPRINGS – Similar styles can make for a fun football game. Both Lewis-Palmer and Coronado made one thing clear as they made their way onto the turf at Garry Berry Stadium.
Whoever was going to control the ground game was going to get the win.
Lewis-Palmer controlled the ground game, controlled the clock and at the end of the night, the Rangers controlled the scoreboard.
They grabbed their first win of the season by beating the Cougars 14-6. The low scoring affair wasn’t a complete surprise considering both teams lean on their rushing attacks which in turn can limit their opponents’ ability to have a solid number of drives through the course of the game.
“You can see where we’re built offensively,” L-P coach Dustin Tupper said. “We’re still growing into it so that’s why you still see some mishandled stuff.”
Two lost fumbles could have been costly for the Rangers (1-1 overall) but the defense also stepped up in a big way and held the Cougars (1-1) to just a single scoring drive.
“I thought they did a good job,” Tupper said. “They ran the ball right at our tail. Our defense stepping up was huge.
The Rangers struck first as they pushed their into the red zone on their second drive of the contest. A facemask penalty on the Cougars put L-P into striking distance and quarterback Devan Zahl broke into the end zone on a one-yard run.
For the remainder of the first half, it was the defenses for each team that did the heavy lifting. Evan Westfall picked off Jayden Rempel to squash a potential scoring effort for the Cougars.
Coronado responded by recovering a Lewis-Palmer fumble early in the third quarter. Dylan Jardin then broke off a big run, setting up a one-yard touchdown run from Rempel. The missed extra point kept the Cougars down a point, but with the way Jardin and Ross Woods were running the ball, they were going to have a shot.
“It’s huge to have that kind of balance and have those guys feed off each other like that,” Coronado coach Monte Gutowski said. “Our front does a good job of getting off the ball and getting after it and those two do a good job of hitting the holes and getting downhill.”
They combined for nearly 130 rushing yards, but they were limited considering the Rangers possessed the ball for over 30 minutes during the game.
A lightning delay couldn’t slow L-P down as the players gathered int the locker room and kept their focus.
“We just talked as a team, kept our focus up and kept everything pretty quiet,” Zahl said.
And they stuck to their game plan, which was to sustain long drives and establish themselves with the running attack.
They kept the ball on the ground and found the end zone again, this time on a six-yard run from Jake Knisley.
“We had to control everything on the ground and control the time,” Zahl added. “We had to use the clock to our advantage.”
By being able to score twice and almost erase the clock, they did just that.