TUMWATER – Tumwater flexed its muscles in the regular season finale, defeating 4A Tahoma 61-21 in a nonleague football game on Friday at Tumwater District Stadium.
The Bears took the game on short notice after the Black Hills canceled the Pioneer Bowl due to injuries and a lack of healthy players.
“Kids played really well. It was a tough week for them, having a game, losing the rivalry game, having to come back together and refocus and play a good 4A team that’s headed to the playoffs next weekend,” Tumwater coach William Garrow said. “It was a really good performance by them today. I’m proud of them.”
The Thunderbirds finished the regular season undefeated and will host a district crossover game next Friday or Saturday.
Tahoma finished the season 4-5 and 4-2 in the 4A North Puget Sound League for third place behind Decatur and Kennedy Catholic.
“They’re a legit big school, they have some really good skill players,” Garrow said. “But our kids love to compete and it wasn’t a situation where they were at all nervous, they were excited to get a game like this, to be challenged a little bit and they rose to the occasion.”
It looked like it would be a big challenge in the first quarter as Tahoma took the ball down the field on the opening possession down the field and scored on a pass from Roman Rough to Benjamin Altick. The Thunderbirds answered with a score on a 1-yard touchdown run by Kooper Clark for a tie game after the first quarter.
Tumwater showed just how good they are in the second quarter, scoring 34 points with rushing touchdowns from Logan Cole, Derek Thompson, Mathias Rodriguez and Clark for a second time. Quarterback Ethan Kastner found Jacob Dillon in the second quarter for a touchdown pass, but Tahoma showed some life with a score just before halftime for a 41-14 score at the break.
“For our kids, I think it was just getting settled into the differences,” Garrow said. “This is a team that is bigger, stronger and faster than some of the teams we’ve seen in the last few weeks and our kids had to acclimate a little bit. Once they did, they started trusting the systems we put in place and executing the way that we’re supposed to.
“We don’t do a whole lot of fancy stuff, we just do what we’ve always done which is control the football, have great fakes and execute the offense and on defense, just get after people.”
The defense held Tahoma to seven points in the second half and a 15-yard rushing touchdown from Jaylin Nixon, a pick-six by Thompson and a touchdown pass from Kastner to David Malroy completed the undefeated regular season.
Garrow wanted to make sure he thanked Tahoma for agreeing to play the Thunderbirds in Tumwater to allow the kids to play one more time during the regular season in front of the home fans.
Even though the games become do or die next week, Garrow said they are going to do the same thing to prepare for the crossover game as Tumwater has done all season.
“We’ve just got to get better. We’ll go back and we’ll watch the film. Our coaches are incredibly good coaches and so they’re going to dissect the film and our kids will think they lost this game on Monday when we watch tape together because the standard is so high here but we’re just going to try to work and get better.”
