NAPA, Calif - The Vintage High School football team claimed the inaugural Vine Valley Athletic League title on Friday night with their 69-14 win over crosstown rival Napa High in Big Game XLVII (47).
It’s the Crushers (8-2 overall, 6-0 VVAL) first league title in football since 2005.
“It feels good after all the work the seniors and the juniors have put up through everything just all the work that we put in on the weight room and on the field and in class,” an enthusiastic Viliami Schaumkel explained afterwards. “Everything's paid off.”
Vintage will also ride a nice eight-game winning streak into next week's North Coast Section Division I playoffs match-up.
“I think the first game and hey all the credit goes to Wood there I’m not going to say anything about that because they whooped us, but I didn’t think we had our identity yet and I don’t think we found our identity until about the second half of Acalanes and I think we had the mishap there at the end against Acalanes, but other then that I think we’ve pretty much dominated every game since, so I think they believe in the system and what we’re doing, they’re having fun, and I think that’s a testament to the kids and their willingness to work hard and have that work ethic and believing in us,” Vintage coach Dylan Leach said of his red hot team.
As for Napa, they made history for all the wrong reasons on Friday night as they ended the season with an 0-10 mark for the first time since 1955.
Early on in the game it appeared as though there was some growl that may come from the Grizzlies as they scored twice in the first half. One score came when Chase LaRue scored on a five-yard scamper in the first quarter, and later LaRue caught a pass from Isaiah Newton for a seven-yard touchdown.
“Our offense usually executes pretty well in the first half when our guys are fresh,” Napa coach Tom Petithomme explained of the first half scores. “Unfortunately, all of our guys are going both ways, and you know it just catches up to them in the second half.”
Vintage meanwhile, showed their creativity on offense by bringing out a plethora of trick plays en route to scoring an astounding 69 points on the night.
“These kids just have fun, we have fun in practice,” Leach said of the trickiness. “Here’s the thing I wouldn’t do that if I didn’t think we’d execute on them, so we execute them at a high level in practice, we score on them in practice, and we kind of knew.”
The Crushers were led by Schaumkel on the night. He ended the night with a whopping 164 yards on just 13 carries to go along with four touchdowns. He was named the Great American Rivalry Series MVP of the game to go along with being recognized as Vintage’s Big Game MVP by the Napa Valley Register.
“I try not to let it get to me as my final year as a senior and play my last Big Game with all these guys and I just wanted to close my eyes and not think about any of this and not think about the game and just do what I do with my lineman opening holes up for me,” Schaumkel said of his stellar performance on the night.
“We knew last week that we gave him a night off and I wanted to make sure that he got his opportunities this week,” Leach said of Schaumkel’s impressive night. “We knew him going in, I firmly believe he’s the best player in this league. I just think he needed opportunity to shine and I think he got that tonight.”
For Schaumkel it’s also nice to have beaten every school in Napa County.
“It feels good just showing all the other schools in this county which school is the perennial powerhouse and just showing an example to the younger ones of choosing what school to go to play football,” he explained.
This was the first Big Game that Petithomme was able to experience, and for him the atmosphere lived up to everything he was told coming in.
“Oh, it was unbelievable,” he said of his first Big Game experience. “Everyone was talking about the Big Game, Big Game, ‘wait till Big Game’ and I was like ‘that’s all just hype, right?’. I’ve coached on the peninsula, I’ve coached in the valley, and everything lived up to the hype, I mean I was shocked. When I came down here this afternoon at one o’clock just to get a ticket and there was a line 50 yards long in the parking lot and there was about a thousand people inside the stadium decorating and getting this place ready, so yeah definitely lived up to the hype.”
With the win Vintage still trails the all-time series 28-17-2 and has won back-to-back Big Games now.
