Orange hangs 10-0 OCC gridiron loss on Golden Eagles

By GARY HENERY

News Man­ag­ing Editor

The Golden Eagles’ game was no where to be found …

Olen­tangy Orange, com­bin­ing the run­ning of seniors Larry Rode and Michael Forbes with an oppor­tunis­tic defense, shut out Big Wal­nut 10–0 in an Ohio Cap­i­tal Con­fer­ence Cap­i­tal Divi­sion matchup on a cold and rainy Fri­day night at Golden Eagle Stadium.

Rode and Forbes were the story the game for the Pio­neers. Run­ning behind a dom­i­nat­ing front line, they com­bined to rush for 198 yards as Orange (5–4, 3–3 OCC) fin­ished with 205 yards in total offense.

Rode, a 5-foot-9, 175-pound back, col­lected 127 yards in 29 car­ries and tal­lied the game’s lone touch­down. He scored on an 8-yard run with 3:29 left in the first period fol­low­ing senior Joshua Parker’s inter­cep­tion at the Pio­neer 47 that gave Orange a first down on the Golden Eagles’ 22 yard line.

Forbes, a 5–7, 210-pound hard-nosed run­ning back, fin­ished with 71 yards in 24 attempts.

Orange’s only other score, a 34-yard fourth-quarter field goal, by senior Mitchell Hop­kins con­cluded the game’s scor­ing with 5:29 to play.

Big Wal­nut (5–4, 3–3 OCC) strug­gled to fin­ish with 146 yards in total offense, net­ting only 60 yards on 25 car­ries and 86 yards through the air on senior quar­ter­back Car­son Chatterton’s 10-for-23 com­ple­tion ratio which included numer­ous dropped passes.

Senior Adam Sha­heen had 4 catches for 31 yards, Myers 3 for 32 yards and senior Gabe Kitchen 2 for 14 yards, Sopho­more back Chris­t­ian John­son led the Golden Eagles on the ground with 39 yards in 10 car­ries. Chat­ter­ton added 17 yards in 12 tries.

“We couldn’t find our game against a good Orange team,” Big Wal­nut head coach Joe Weaver said. “The Pio­neers did a good job con­trol­ling the line of scrim­mage, espe­cially on offense where we could never find our offen­sive rhythm. And some of the credit goes to Orange which played a solid game.”

Big Wal­nut was also plagued by untimely penal­ties which helped keep Pio­neer dri­ves alive or inter­rupted the flow of the Golden Eagles’ offense attack. The Golden Eagles drew 7 penal­ties for 87 yards.

The Golden Eagles crossed mid­field only three times, the last time thanks to Seth Myers inter­cept­ing a Jacob Stier pass as the Big Wal­nut 42 and return­ing it to the Orange 27 late in the third quar­ter. But the series would end on downs four plays later at the Pio­neer 21 — Big Walnut’s deep­est pen­e­tra­tion of the night.

“It was one of the nights where we could never get any­thing going,” Weaver said, “and when we did we could not con­vert key plays on offense, drew a penalty or turned the ball over.”

Big Walnut’s last series of the game fit­tingly ended on senior Kori Saun­ders’ inter­cep­tion of a Chat­ter­ton pass at the Pio­neer 40-yard line.

The Golden Eagles put the wraps on the 2012 sea­son Fri­day night in a 7:30 p.m. OCC Cap­i­tal Divi­sion matchup at Franklin Heights. The Fal­cons (2–7, 0–6 OCC) dropped a 25–0 OCC deci­sion to Delaware Hayes Fri­day night at Gau­thier Field in Delaware.

Posted by Gary Henery on Oct 24 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.