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| SportsThursday, October 11, 2007 12:34 AM CDT |
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Truly a timely win for Olympia football
STANFORD -- Time was running out on the Olympia High School football team’s chance to snap a 30-game losing streak. The question was, just how quickly were the seconds ticking away? A malfunctioning clock meant time had to be kept on the field Friday night during the Spartans’ homecoming game against Prairie Central. So as Olympia was driving late in the game, with the score tied at 14-all, senior lineman Colt Stroud kept asking, “How much time’s left?” When junior quarterback Aaron Frazier scored on a 37-yard run, Stroud sprinted off the field, believing he had won for the first time as a varsity player. “The coaches said, ‘There’s still time left,’ ” Stroud said. “I said, ‘How much?’ Then, after every defensive play, I said, ‘How much?’ Finally, they said, ‘Zero.’ ” Turns out Frazier’s go-ahead TD came with 20 seconds left. It capped a rally from an 8-0 halftime deficit and a 14-8 deficit early in the fourth quarter. The win was Olympia’s first since week 3 of the 2004 season, and was particularly sweet for senior starters Stroud, Adam Hendricks and Luke Whitaker. “Right after we heard the game was over (officially), we ran up to each other,” Stroud said. “We’re like brothers because we’ve been through so much together. I think we were just as happy for each other as we were for ourselves.” The victory came on a night the Spartans played without seven regulars in the first half. Some were injured, and others were suspended for a half for disciplinary reasons by coach Matt Koeppel. Trailing 8-0, Olympia turned the ball over deep in its territory in the first half, but managed to force Prairie Central to attempt a field goal, which was no good. “We didn’t hang our heads,” Koeppel said. “We said, ‘We’re going to stop them here and get the ball back.’ We had to kind of hold the boat afloat until we got to full strength. “The fact we had to overcome some adversity shows we’re building something here. It’s the first game where we had a couple of things go wrong and we bounced back.” Frazier said the long streak “stuck with us when we played.” “Whenever we would begin to lose, everybody would be like, ‘Here we go again,’ ” Frazier said. “To win this one, maybe people will start changing the way they think about the team.” “We were getting to a point where it seemed like we were almost supposed to lose because everything would go wrong,” Stroud said. “It finally came together.” The Spartans (1-6) play a nonconference game Friday at Knoxville (also 1-6). Could they make it two in a row? “That’s what we’ve been thinking about,” Frazier said. “Hopefully, we can turn the streak around and get a winning streak going.” Get area high school sports scores and statistics at Varsity Sports. E-mail this story | Print this story | Search archives | RSS Show comments |  Hide comments | Hide comments on all stories |
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mahometbigdogs wrote on Oct 11, 2007 8:56 PM:
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