Vintage’s shoutout on defensive side of ball leads the way in rolling of Sonoma Valley
By Kyle Foster
Twitter: @NapaKyle @NapaSportsNews
Shutouts on defense are always helpful when it comes to trying to win a football game.
It also helps that all season long the Vintage football team has had a rock-solid defensive unit. On Friday night, they showed off how good they can be when Vintage throttled Sonoma Valley 66-14.
Vintage (5-3 overall, 4-1 Vine Valley Athletic League) was playing in the backfield all night long defensively. They were able to record a whopping eight sacks on the night.
“We talked about it all week. We put a number out, our goal, and I believe we hit it plus three,” Vintage head coach Dylan Leach said. “So that was something that we really, really, really wanted to accomplish, and we felt like all year we’ve been getting close but haven’t had the big sets so we wanted to make sure that we executed and got sacks.”
Through Sonoma Valley (0-8, 0-5 VVAL) found the scoreboard twice during this one, none of them was the fault of the defense. However, the Vintage defense was able to force a safety in the first quarter.
The Dragons’ first score came on a 90-yard kickoff return by Joey Fiorito. Their only other score came when Spencer Jacobs recovered a Crusher fumble at their own 32-yard line and scored.
“It’s kind of something that plagued us all year,” Leach explained of the two scores his team allowed. “The fumbles, we had two interceptions just not executed. I think we had three penalties again right in the beginning game, so all those things need to get cleaned up.”
The night also saw the Crushers have some of their own fireworks on special teams when Mo Schaumkel had an 85-yard touchdown return.
“Honestly, it was just the great blocking,” Schaumkel said of his kick return. “It was just our wedge – our little wedge cross and everything. I just hit the wedge and then went outside and just did what we could do and scored.”
Leach was also happy to see the special teams adding to the point total.
“It’s always good to have special team scores just because it’s a fifth of the game,” he explained. “People don’t realize that in high school, it’s literally 1/5th of the game it’s twenty percent of the game. So we got to spend twenty percent of our time on it and we do – we don’t cheat the game. We work on special teams all the time, so it’s great to have that rewarded.”
The win is also huge because there is now a three-way tie for the Vine Valley Athletic League title after American Canyon beat Casa Grande 48-30. In the other VVAL game, Petaluma beat Napa 41-27.
Up next for Vintage is their regular-season finale when they are the visitor in Big Game L (50) against Napa next Friday night. This is the first time Vintage has been the road team in an even-numbered Big Game in the series history. This will also be the second Big Game of the 2021 calendar year, which is also a first for the rivalry. Napa leads the all-time series 29-18-2, with the Crushers winning the last four Big Games.
