HS Football: Pottsville falls to Northwestern Lehigh
Pottsville's players take the field for warmups prior to Friday's game against Northwestern Lehigh at Veterans Memorial Stadium. (Photo by Bob Lipsky)
POTTSVILLE — Shane Leh looks like a college quarterback playing high school football.
Northwestern Lehigh’s senior signal-caller controls everything. He sees everything. He can run. He can throw from the pocket. He can throw on the run. And he makes great decisions.
Leh picked apart Pottsville’s defense, throwing five touchdown passes as the Tigers cruised to a 42-0 victory over the Crimson Tide in a Schuylkill-Colonial Red Division game Friday night at Veterans Memorial Stadium.
“A little bit of everything. Anytime you have a shutout in a mercy-rule game, you know you’re doing something well. … We executed well,” Northwestern Lehigh coach Josh Snyder said.
Leh finished the night completing 13-of-19 passes for 254 yards and no interceptions. The 6-foot-1, 187-pound Leh needed exactly two plays to drive Northwestern Lehigh to the end zone for the only score it needed. Braxton Lakatosh broke off a 36-yard scamper on the Tigers’ first offensive play, then Leh found Brady Zimmerman for a 28-yard touchdown and a 7-0 lead with 9:42 left in the first quarter.
Leh, a three-year starter making his 38th career start, directed the Tigers (7-0, 5-0 Red) to touchdowns on 6-of-7 drives before handing the offense over to the reserves in the fourth quarter.
“He’s very comfortable in the offense,” Snyder said of Leh. “He’s comfortable with his reads. He never tries to force the football, even when he was a sophomore. That’s one of the things that he’s done so well is protecting the ball.”
Northwestern Lehigh spread the wealth as four different players scored TDs. Zimmerman was the most active, adding touchdown receptions of 66 and 35 yards in his big night. Zimmerman finished with six receptions for 167 yards and three TDs. Mason Bollinger caught a 10-yard touchdown pass, and Shane Hulmes hauled in a 27-yarder to make it 28-0 at halftime.
Chase Sukanick added a 19-yard touchdown run in the fourth quarter to set the final.
“I thought our playmakers made plays,” Snyder said. “We didn’t press, sort of shared it around as per usual. Our guys were flying around on defense, making a lot of plays, a lot of stops. Their big kid (Max Clews) runs pretty hard, and I was proud of the effort.”
Pottsville (2-5, 2-4 Red) has been shut out two weeks in a row but had a bright spot in the hard-nosed running of Clews. A converted tight end, Clews rushed 17 times for 83 yards, taking handoffs and some direct snaps.
“In the middle quarters, we ran the ball a little bit with Max,” Pottsville coach Mike Brennan said. “Our O-line stayed the course, fought. … We’re going to take every little victory right now and try to build with it.”
The Tide reached the Northwestern Lehigh 13 during a 13-play drive in the third quarter, but a bobbled snap stalled Pottsville short of the end zone. Pottsville quarterback Andrew Allen scrambled 16 yards on fourth-and-7 to extend the march, but he took a crushing hit at the end of the run. Allen stayed down on the turf for a few minutes as medical personnel attended to him. Allen eventually sat up, then stood and walked off the field under his own power. He did not return to the game.
Pottsville now turns its attention to the final three-game stretch run of the regular season. The Tide travel to Wilson Area next Saturday before hosting rivals Blue Mountain and North Schuylkill in Weeks 9 and 10.
“We have to come together and stay together,” Brennan said. “At halftime, they were relaying a message as I was walking in. It was positive. It was uplifting, and that’s what we have to do right now. We have to find the little battles, and find out what we are and who we are, beginning this weekend, and try to become a better football team by next Saturday.”
