Quarterback Davian McDonald ’25 winds up for a pass to his teammate.
With a 60 yard catch, KJ Edwards PG ’23 secured Andover Football’s longest gain against Brunswick this Saturday despite falling short 14-35. With its fifth consecutive loss, Andover’s record stands at 1-5.
Despite the loss, Nick Jones ’24 recounted the first Andover touchdown of the game by Edwards to tie the score at 7, which he believes was the highlight of the game.
Jones said, “In the first quarter, [Davian McDonald ’25] threw a touchdown to KJ. It was a great pass, and a great catch. I think it was a sixty-yard touchdown, or something crazy like that. It was the first touchdown of the game, and it tied the game up. It really kept the energy high.”
According to McDonald, there was some success on defense and highlighted the return of running back Logan Cove ’24.
“I think we did really good on defense actually, especially in the first half. They’re a really good team, but we got a lot of stops and it put our offense in a position to score. We also did good running the ball. Logan, he came back. This [was] his first game back and he had some big runs. I mean also I think just every week I think we do pretty good with passing the ball and moving it up,” said McDonald.
McDonald acknowledged the continuous errors on both sides of the field that led Andover to fall short. He especially pointed out mental errors—smaller errors that can be fixed through sufficient practice and better teamwork.
McDonald said, “I think some of the times we were just making mental errors. Like a drop pass, jumping off sides or missing a tackle; things we do every week. It’s not like physical things, it’s more like mental errors that we could fix. Fix in practice and stuff, but we messed up on defense a little bit towards the end. We started getting a little lazy, they started scoring. We made some mistakes on the offense as well, we dropped some passes and I missed some passes and I overthrew some passes, but I mean overall we did pretty good. We made some mistakes and we could’ve done better.”
With the only two wins coming against Kent in the past two seasons, the program has faced a rough patch. According to Henry Sheldon ’24 the team has developed some since last season’s loss against Brunswick.
“I think we’re just going to keep building off of this and obviously, it was a tough loss but I think, well honestly, Brunswick is a great team. Brunswick is a team that last year we lost to 48-0 [on] Parents Weekend. This is a huge improvement, so I think we’re just going to keep building off of this with practices of high intensity and keep building off of this energy,” said Sheldon.
Andover will be hosting Deerfield this Saturday.
