Fluvanna’s first-year head coach Steve Szarmach is looking for a little cohesion, a rallying point for Fluvanna football.
Enter a growling wolf sound effect and Duran Duran’s ‘Hungry Like the Wolf’ blaring over the stadium public address system in a move that set a unique tone for the beginning of a new era.
“This is my first year with football but all the (sports) I’ve coached in the past, I like a theme,” Szarmach said. “When we came to camp we talked about an attacking style of defense and (an attacking) team style. So we thought of a wolf pack attacking something, so this year our theme is the Fluco Pack Attack.”
While Fluvanna’s pack attack didn’t pick up a victory in Szarmach’s first game as a head coach against Freedom Friday night, the Flucos did manage to fight off some late-week adversity to hang around and nearly pull out a win. Freedom hung on for a 21-20 victory despite a strong defensive effort by Fluvanna.
Fluvanna’s starting quarterback Gavin Patrick suffered an ankle injury Thursday, leaving Fluvanna scrambling after an offseason where Patrick took the great majority of snaps with the first team. To compensate, Fluvanna shifted running back Mark Grooms to quarterback and put Jason Lee in at tailback.
“Losing our starting quarterback two days before (the game) was tough,” Szarmach said. “I had to dial down the offense a little bit because some of the stuff (Grooms) just hadn’t run in practice.”
That simplification didn’t show early as Fluvanna raced out to a 7-0 lead when Grooms ripped off a 43-yard touchdown on the Flucos’ first drive. Grooms finished with 120 yards on 11 carries, including a 65-yard touchdown in the third quarter.
But it was Freedom’s own ground attack that milked the clock with a pair of long, sustained drives that really hurt Fluvanna. The first march came as an answer to Grooms’ early sprint as an 11-play drive ended with Jack Fitzgerald finding Bobby Doherty for a touchdown from 35 yards out. The second march came at the start of the third quarter as Freedom took seven and a half minutes to drive 84 yards on 14 plays, with Gordy again capping the march, this time with a 9-yard touchdown.
“I was joking with the official that that was the best ugly game I think you’ll ever see,” said Freedom coach Sean Curry. “It was so up and down and both teams, through all of our sloppiness, played really hard.”
That score put Freedom up 21-14 after a 2-point conversion, but Fluvanna didn’t go quietly. Three plays later, Grooms reversed field and wove through the Freedom defense en route to his 65-yard score. A missed PAT was costly however as that left Fluvanna down 21-20 with a little more than a quarter to play.
Fluvanna’s defense stepped up in the fourth quarter with Antonio Washington picking off a pass to give Fluvanna one opportunity that resulted in a Fluvanna punt. The defense then made a stop on fourth down but the offense went the wrong way, with a fourth and 28 forcing another punt. The defense held strong again for Fluvanna and forced a Freedom punt with 1:52 left. Again though the Fluvanna offense stalled and turned the ball over on downs with under a minute left.
“We had a lot of great tackles and I thought we did a really good job,” Szarmach said. “After this game, the guys were really fired up to get back here Monday. This is a really good group of players and coaches and we’re having fun.”
Jay Amos had a strong outing for Fluvanna with a trio of pass breakups, a 13-yard touchdown catch and a wide receiver pass to Josh Carbee that helped spark the touchdown drive that ended with his score. Amos finished with five catches for 36 yards.
For Freedom, Brett Dineen led the way in the Eagles’ option, flexbone style attack with 117 yards and a touchdown on 22 carries, while Robert Mayo had 43 yards on eight touches and Doherty had 50 yards on nine carries in a balanced ground game.
“That’s our goal, we don’t have real high numbers but we’ve got some real good football players,” Curry said. “We’ve got some kids playing both ways and special teams and in order to preserve them, you want to try and distribute the ball a little bit.”
Fluvanna will look to pick up its first win of the season on the road against Spotsylvania Friday at 7 p.m.
