When Highlands football coach Bob Sphire watched Tayden Lorenzen pick off a pass and carry it 12 yards for a touchdown against Cooper on Friday, he needed only a single word to express himself.
“Wow!” Sphire said. “Wow! Wow!”
There were “wow” moments aplenty in the Bluebirds’ 45-6 running-clock win at David Cecil Memorial Stadium.
Start with sophomore quarterback Bryce Armstrong through the air – 8-of-13 for 161 yards and two touchdowns.
Next was Armstrong on the ground – 11 carries for 102 yards and two more touchdowns. Altogether, he had a hand in 263 of Highlands’ 326 yards (80.6%) of offense.
“Bryce is a different athlete,” Cooper coach Adam Begley said. “He made plays, he’s going to make plays. I think he moves well, he keeps his eyes down the field. He’s going to be fun to watch the next few years.”
There was the Bluebird defense that held the Jaguars (1-1) to 136 total yards.
And finally, Lorenzen’s tip and score. Sphire said he hadn’t seen a play like it since at least 2013, when he was coach at North Gwinnett (Georgia) and watched former South Carolina player Dante Sawyer do the same thing.
Highlands (1-1) thus emphatically erased last week’s season-opening, four-turnover 41-20 loss at Frederick Douglass.
“I thought we came out really sharp (Friday),” Sphire said. “I was afraid we’d have a hangover from last week.”
Begley told his team in the postgame huddle what perhaps seemed painfully obvious – the Jaguars could not afford any more starts like Friday’s 28-0 first quarter deficit.
“We ran into a good football team,” Begley said. “We had some mental mistakes … So for us, we just have to go back and watch the film and make sure we don’t make the same mistakes again coming out next week against Ryle.”
Something else was clear: Armstrong was more comfortable in his second varsity start.
“Probably my decision-making,” Armstrong said when asked what was the biggest improvement was. “Last week we had a lot of turnovers, and we had to come back and fix that. We can’t win a state championship with all those turnovers, so we were just focusing on practice, ball-handling; just not throwing pick and stuff, and it worked this week.”
It didn’t take two minutes for the Bluebirds to open the scoring when Armstrong converted a fourth-and 11 into a 32-yard pass to John Feldbruegge for the touchdown. It only took six minutes more for a 14-0 lead on Armstrong’s two-yard run.
Highlands needed just 53 seconds to double that when Colt Kremer scored with a minute to go followed by Lorenzen’s tip, pick and touchdown off Cooper quarterback Zach Kostopoulos.
“I just saw that it was a screen, so I jumped, and things just went my way,” Lorenzen said.
Sphire called what Lorenzen did “an uncanny athletic play.”
“But it’s also, again, his sign of probably knowing what the quarterback was thinking, reading the body language of the quarterback, reading his eyes – all those things,” Sphire said.
Armstrong’s 58-yard pass to Ben Kuhnhein sent the game to a running-clock 35-0 lead. Cooper avoided the shutout when Kostopoulos found Carson Clark for a six-yard touchdown.
Armstrong’s second rushing touchdown, a 16-yard run a little more than three minutes into the fourth quarter, featured a spin through an attempted tackle. Parker Shaw’s 35-yard field goal ended the scoring.
BLUEBIRDS 45, JAGUARS 6
COOPER — 0-6-0-0 — 6
HIGHLANDS — 28-7-0-10 — 45
Scoring Plays
First quarter
H-John Feldbrugge 32 pass from Bryce Armstrong (kicked blocked), 10:12
H-Armstrong 2 run (Tayden Lorenzen run), 4:36
H-Colt Kremer 3 run (Kai Anderson kick), 1:00
H-Lorenzen 12 interception return (Anderson kick), 0:07
Second quarter
H-Ben Kuhnhein 58 pass from Armstrong (Anderson kick), 9:27
C-Carson Clark 6 pass from Zach Kostopoulos (kick blocked), 1:10
Fourth quarter
H-Armstrong 16 run (Parker Shaw kick), 8:26
H-Shaw 35 field goal, 5:16
Records: Cooper 1-1, Highlands 1-1.
