JESUS CANO
Prep2Prep Adult Contributor

October 5, 2019

OAKLEY — At the end of Pittsburg’s 49-33 victory over Freedom, a young fan looked up at quarterback Jerry Johnson. Just the fact the six-foot three-inch donned a Pirates uniform made the child at a loss for words.

“That’s so awesome,” the young fan said.

But once Johnson was in the same shoes. Back when he was in middle school, he always thought to himself — what’s a way he could be remembered in his community?

The answer is the number 22.

That was Johnson’s lucky number and now he sits at the top of the record for for Pittsburg. After his 203 yard and three touchdown performance, Johnson broke the single season record for most passing touchdowns previously held in a three way tie between Jason Guerrero, Joe Lewis and Julius Mozee.

All glory to God,” said Johnson. “I really wasn't worried about the record. I was going with the flow, taking it one play at a time.”

Pittsburg scored 17 unanswered points to begin the game but it wasn’t a walk in the park by any means.

Freedom came into the game 0-6, but played its best game all season, holding Johnson to three for eight passes completed with only 20 yards in the first quarter.

With just over three minutes left to play in the first half, Freedom scored twice including a passing touchdown from Jake Byrne to Matt Quesada and Jordan Lee run.

Johnson scored his record breaking pass to Brian Pierce Jr. — the same player that caught his record tying pass — to give the Pirates the 23-14 leverage heading into half.

Freedom got back on track in its first possession of the third quarter, on Lee’s second touchdown of the game being set up by a DeNiro Killian Jr. 63-yard catch to cut its deficit 23-21.

Johnson kept adding to his record by throwing his third touchdown pass of the game to Avant Muldrow to make it 36-21.

After a series of back and forth plays between the two teams, that saw Muldrow add to the lead on a 31-yard drive while Lee cut the score to 49-33 with his third touchdown of theg ame, Brett Basola recorded a sack to have Pittsburg go-three and out.

It looked promising, but Freedom couldn’t hang on to the ball and it cost them the game with seven turnovers.

Freedom wasn’t able to recover.

“Nobody has given up,” said Freedom head coach Andrew Cotter. “Everyone is fighting. We keep competing and hopefully they can apply that outside of life.”

Pittsburg coach Victor Galli said his team has a lot of work to do with the unofficial BVAL championship game vs. Liberty occurring Oct. 18. Luckily for both teams there is a bye week in between.

“We got ahead of ourselves,” said Galli. “We got a lot of stuff we need to clean up after this. It’s going to be a challenge. It should be fun.”