Muskie ‘Bees’ stung by Warriors

Shane Beckett saw three football squads on the field Monday night—and he wasn’t suffering from impaired vision.
“We had two teams show up,” the distinctly frustrated offensive co-ordinator said about the Muskie ‘B’ team’s 26-0 loss to the host Warroad Warriors.
“There was the team that played the first half not so well and the team that came to play in the second half,” he noted.
Unfortunately for Muskie supporters, the game was all but decided by halftime, with the Warriors doing all their scoring in the first two quarters during a torturous night of miserable playing conditions.
“The weather was absolutely brutal,” recalled Beckett, whose team is 0-4 this season with two games remaining. “We walked out for warm-up, and there was a hailstorm going on.
“Throughout the game, it was really cold, rainy, and windy.
“That gave us not much option to pass, and we couldn’t get the ball rolling on the ground, either,” he noted.
Beckett was scratching his head over how the Muskies brought nothing to the table in the first half after playing an inspired game last Thursday in a 16-14 loss to the International Falls Broncos.
“To almost beat the Falls is really a big thing,” he said. “I thought we would come out a lot sharper than we did.
“You have to be into a game on three levels: physically, emotionally, and mentally,” he stressed. “Tonight, we weren’t into it mentally or emotionally. The guys were just flat.”
The Warriors, who beat the Muskies 38-6 here Sept. 4, used a triple-headed option attack to confuse the black and gold.
“They ran a lot of misdirection that had our guys getting sucked into their first motion, and then they’d go the other way,” said Beckett, who added injury troubles didn’t help his team’s cause.
“We lost middle linebacker Alex Wepruk in Friday’s [‘A’] game in Winnipeg, and had to plug in Jesse Bowes into his spot,” said Beckett. “Jesse hasn’t played there all year and hasn’t even had any repetitions there in practice.
“It’s pretty tough to put a guy in there like that and expect him to be okay.”
< *c>Goal-line woes
Last Thursday’s affair with the Broncos was a nail-biter that came down to the Muskies not being able to hold on to the football near the Falls’ goal line on two separate occasions.
The black-and-gold took the opening drive all the way to the Broncos’ two, before Steven Boileau fumbled after catching an outside pass near the sideline and had it recovered by the Broncos’ Dan Ducharme.
The Muskies recovered to take a 6-0 lead when running back Jordan York crashed through the Broncos’ defence on a third-and-six from the Falls’ 15 for the game’s opening score.
But Fort High failed on the two-point convert that ultimately was the deciding margin of the game.
That advantage held up until the third quarter, when on the third play from scrimmage, the Broncos’ Jacob Larsen took a hand-off and rambled 64 yards for the major.
It was his last contribution for the day as he injured his Achilles tendon after being tackled by the Muskies’ Terry Carmody at the goal line.
Tyler Weir ran in the two-point convert for an 8-6 lead, but the Muskies seemed determined to re-assert themselves as the front-runners.
Boileau hauled in a 30-yard pass from quarterback Joel Herbert and York ran through two tacklers to set up a first-and-goal situation. But Herbert then was picked off by Josh Stougard at the one to kill the drive.
Carmody, who replaced an injured York (hip) later in the quarter, outran the Broncos’ Nick Sether to the pylon to score on a four-yard run early in the fourth and then added the two-point convert to make it 14-8 for the Muskies.
But Stougard worked himself free behind the Muskies’ secondary and ripped off a 49-yard pass-and-run play down to the Fort Frances 10, where Carmody chased him down from behind.
Weir eventually scooted into the end zone on a second-and-goal from the one, and tacked on the game-winning points with a dandy run to the outside to make good on the two-point conversion—barely evading a diving Boileau.
The Muskies tried for one more comeback, but Carmody was held to one yard on a fourth-and-nine end run with just over a minute to play to force a turnover on downs.
From there, the Broncos used the scrambling ability of quarter Devon Clark to pick up the first down they needed to allow them to kill the clock.
The “Bees” next will host the Lake of the Woods (Baudette) Bears here Monday (Oct. 6) at 5 p.m., before closing their season with an Oct. 14 match-up in Roseau against the Rams.