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.
Sparked by the spirited play of junior Jeff Lynch and his two touchdowns, the Martha’s Vineyard football squad recaptured the Island Cup last Saturday, defeating Nantucket 38-12. The win marked the end of the Vineyarders’ perfect 10-0 regular season and secured them a spot in the Division 5 Super Bowl on Dec. 4 at Boston University.
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.
The Vineyard varsity football team rolled over Nantucket by a score of 31-6 Saturday, winning on Nantucket soil for only the third time since 1978 in a contest whose outcome was never really in doubt.
From the beginning to end, last year’s Island Cup champions controlled the game, holding their opponents defensively and blowing past them on offense.
“It was total domination,” said head coach Donald Herman, who has described his team’s past 20 and 30-point shutouts as fair and even downright bad performances.
Saturday’s game for the Island Cup is one of the most-storied high school rivalries in the country, and the defining moment for a Vineyard culture that flourishes for three months every year.
But unlike the shedding trees or shrinking afternoons that mark the end of what is arguably one of the nicest times of year on the Island, football season goes out with a bang.
NANTUCKET - If not for a couple of yards, it might have been a game for the ages, recounted in coffee haunts, barber shops and summer barbecues for generations to come.
But when Martha’s Vineyard high school quarterback Mike Snowden fumbled the ball in overtime on the Nantucket two-yard line Saturday, another great Island Cup showdown was over and the Whalers escaped with a 13-7 win.
This was a bizarre, hard-fought game with more strange twists than an Elmore Leonard thriller.
