Rolling out to his right after faking a handoff to a running back cutting left, Post-Graduate William Sirmon ’17 sprinted for 52 yards to score a touchdown for Andover Football. The touchdown answered an opening kickoff score from its opponents, Cheshire Academy, and brought the score to 7-6. Sirmon’s touchdown was one of a few bright spots in a lopsided loss, as Andover fell to a talented Chesire unit 47-12.
Although Andover put forth immense effort in Saturday’s game, the team was unable to secure a win against its opponent. Cheshire, the runner-up in last year’s Nepsac Class A championship game, was an incredibly talented team.
Head Coach Leon Modeste said, “[We were] outmanned, outgunned, and overpowered. I’ve never seen a team quite like [Cheshire]. They were amazing.”
Nevertheless, the team fought from the beginning till the end, with Sirmon scoring early and Andrew Antonucci ’18 scoring a touchdown at the end of the game.
Co-Captain Keegan Cummings ’17 said, “We continued to play hard regardless of the score and the injuries that began to pile up. We need to get healthy to finish out the season strong.”
One of Andover’s primary problems is that many of its critical components of its rotation are out with injuries – severely impacting its chemistry and game play.
Colton Fahey ’19 said, “We’re going to focus on finishing 4-4 – right now we’re 0-4. We’re gonna really try hard to win these next four, because we’ve had a lot of position changes and it has messed with the team chemistry a little bit, but we have been getting better as a team and as a unit and playing better and we want to continue to do so.”
Having to train a new team and juggle players on and off of the bench while also trying to compete and win has proven to be a very difficult task.
Fahey added, “We switched up the offense this week – that was working pretty well at the beginning of the game and we were able to put up some points this week, unlike last week against Choate. Also, our defense played really well in the first half, but we kind of just lost control in the second half and we made some mistakes that lost the game for us and shifted our momentum.”
Although the game play was far from perfect, the team did show improvement compared to previous games.
Larson Tolo ’18 said, “Compared to the Choate game that we played two weeks ago, we really improved on offense and defense and team chemistry. We played a really talented team, [Cheshire], and we hope to take the positives from that game and build from them in our next game against Suffield and hopefully we’ll continue on with a winning streak, capping it off with Exeter.”
On Saturday, the team faces off against Suffield looking to continue the rest of the season with a clean slate.
Editor’s Note: Larson Tolo is an Associate Copy Editor for The Phillipian.
