WINDSOR – The Windsor football season needed a boot of confidence and the young Yellow Jackets were confident about not going to the boot.
The Yellow Jackets scored a two-point conversion rather than attempting a point-after kick that would have tied the game with 5:57 to play, edging BFA-Fairfax 15-14 in an important Division III game on Saturday.
Owen Abrahamsen scored on a reverse for a win that snapped a two-game skid for the defending Division III champions on Homecoming Weekend.
What made coach Greg Balch roll the dice when Windsor could have tied the game with plenty of time remaining?
“I thought we could score. We were moving the ball right then and we had good momentum,” Balch said. “Our kicking game is decent but it’s not 100 percent that we can make that kick and so you’re weighing the probability of the two-point conversion being successful versus the kick and it tilted in favor of the two. As a coaching staff we were pretty unanimous about it.”
As a group the Jacks didn’t even blink when Balch called for a two-point conversion.
“One of the things I love about this group is that they’re coachable,” Balch said. “If you say go for two they go for two.”
He laughed.
“Probably last year’s group was more vocal on questioning stuff.”
The Jacks marched 51 yards on six plays with rugged Robert Slocum covering all but 10 of the yards. He scored from 17 yards out to cut the lead to 14-13, dragging at least one tackler across the goal line.
Windsor is back to 2-2 while the Bullets dropped to 1-3.
“Our backs were against the wall a little bit,” said Balch. His team has lost back to back at Poultney and Milton, the latter when Windsor quarterback Ryland Richardson missed part of the game with an injury.
“We had to come up with this victory, no question about it.”
Windsor scored first when Richardson combined with Abrahamsen on a pretty play. Abrahamsen ran a post pattern down the right sideline and Richardson laid the ball in his hands on a dead run, and he sprinted away from a defender on an 87-yard play. Slocum added the point after at 4:29 of the second period and that 7-0 score held for nearly a full period.
BFA surged in front 8-7 at 4:49 of the third on a big play of its own, a 60-yard run by quarterback Cameron Meunier when BFA went to the wishbone. He escaped tacklers in the backfield, got outside and then cut back across the field for the score. Colby Bergeron ran for the points after.
BFA had a nice 63-yard drive to take the lead with Bergeron scoring from a yard out on fourth down with 9:18 left to play. This time Bergeron’s points-after run was stopped dead by Windsor on what amounted to one of the biggest plays of the game; a successful conversion would have made it a two-score game at 16-7.
Slocum was the workhorse of the Windsor offense with 146 yards on 27 carries, while Richardson was 4 for 5 passing for 121 yards.
Noah Brock ran for 102 yards for BFA and Meunier had 99, most of them on his long scoring run.
Windsor is home again next weekend against Oxbow, which beat MSJ 39-0 Saturday for its first victory.
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