Chaparral had a busy offseason with the hiring of the Brent Barnes and making the jump up to 6A. Like the offseason, the Firebirds’ season-opening overtime win over Hamilton was interesting.
It took:
- a fourth quarter 4th and 30 conversion
- a 43-yard game-tying field goal from Tommy Christakos
- the defense forcing two turnovers with Hamilton inside the Chaparral 10-yard line
- Forcing Hamilton to kick a field goal in overtime
- Scoring on 3rd and long to win in overtime
All this led to Brent Barnes’ first win as Chaparral’s head coach.
“I never doubted that they were going to compete,” Barnes said. “The question always is when things don’t go our way, how would we respond? That’s the one thing I really challenged them on and was really not sure how we would. Tonight I think think we showed even when things go bad, we still found a way to fight through that and stay the course. That’s probably the thing I learned the most is we can do that, now let’s build on that a little more.”
Offensively, quarterback Jack Miller had few issues spreading the ball around to his talented skill players. Deavon Crawford, Tommy Christakos and Marcus Norvell all caught touchdown passes. Running back Darvon Hubbard ran for two touchdowns. Crawford also made quite a few plays as a defensive back.
Defensively, Kamdan Hightower had two interceptions and the defense as a whole stood up twice when their back was against the goal line.
“Our defense, I’ve never been more proud,” Christakos said. “I’ve never seen our defense play like that. The adversity, just never giving up. I mean scoreboard, we were up. We’ve been in that position, our offense wasn’t completing drives. But at the end of the day, we came in in (crunchtime) and did what we needed to do to get the (win).”
The 1-0 Firebirds will host Desert Mountain next week.
