The Vineyarders closed out their most successful season to date with a sparkling 5-2 record, beating Nantucket, after beating them soundly the week before on the Vineyard. Gordon Bassett and John Bunker rushed the Nantucket quarterback, Vaughan Machado, in a second period pass play from the Nantucket 30. In a play described by Assistant Coach Francis Pachico as “The most unbelievable play of the year,” Machado threw the ball away, from about his own fifteen. Only he got turned around under pressure, and threw to his own goal line.
The Regional High School football team went down to its fourth defeat of the season Saturday in a game with Nantucket at War Veterans’ Memorial Park in Vineyard Haven. The score was 14 to 8.
For the Vineyard footballers, the outcome of yesterday’s game with Nantucket in a scoreless tie was a moral victory. The young Vineyarders held the experienced Nantucketers down to an even-stephen nothingness all the
The end-zone boys were the only ones in or around the high school field Saturday afternoon who didn’t flinch at the negative-five windchill factor.
These hardies stood under the goal posts dressed in light sweatshirts and watched the Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard football teams battle up and down the hard-packed field. When the Vineyard broke a big gain, they threw their fists into the air and shouted approval.
Having lost only one game out of six this season, the Nantucket High School football team came to Veterans Memorial Park Saturday and added still another victory to its record by defeating the Regional High School team 26 to 0. Nantucket’s power and experience accounted for everything, although neither of those qualities made any real showing until the final quarter, when the Nantucketers really got all gears meshing.
As Vineyard coach Don Herman arrived at Nantucket’s football field carrying the Island Cup last Saturday, a couple of fans wearing Nantucket sweatshirts jokingly offered to take it from him. Coach Herman smiled politely, clutched the Cup a little tighter, and kept walking.
Nantucket’s team was finally able to wrest the Cup from the coach’s grasp, but it took all 40 minutes of the game to do so. In a brave effort, the Vineyarders came back from a 21-6 halftime deficit to tie the game before Nantucket prevailed by the final score of 27-21.
They completed an 11-0 season. They are league champions. And they have already danced with a trophy over their heads in front of a home crowd. Yet, there is still one element needed before the Vineyard high school football team can call this a perfect season.
The game with Nantucket on Saturday turned out to be one of the roughest that the Martha’s Vineyard footballers have encountered. Judging by the number of injuries suffered by the Island boys, it was the roughest, with the principal Vineyard players seemingly one by one being removed from the game as the advantage irrevocably turned toward the Nantucketers, who finally defeated their visitors 33 to 20.
The debut of the first Vineyard football team, under the guidance of Coaches John Kelley, Daniel McCarthy and Stanley Whitman, will take place tomorrow afternoon on the newly laid-out field at the Veterans Memorial Park in Vineyard Haven. For their first game the Island boys are taking on the impressive gridiron group from the Ashland High School, a team that boasts fifteen straight wins.
Steve McCarthy and his regional high school football team take the field Friday night under the lights, marking the first time in 28 years that someone other than Don Herman will be standing on the sidelines.