In eight short weeks, Trinity Episcopal’s football team transformed itself.
By Friday night in the VISAA Division II title game, the No.3-seeded Titans didn’t look anything like the squad that No. 1 St. Anne’s-Belfield crushed by 40 points back in September, and on a night where little went right for the Saints in the red zone, the Titans prevailed 20-10 to win the state championship.
“We got beat by a good football team tonight, let’s not take anything away from them,” said St. Anne’s-Belfield coach John Blake. “They came in our house and beat us 20-10, you’ve got to give it to them. We did a lot of bad things because they were doing good things.”
STAB struggled early on against the run and a swing pass that functioned like a sweep in the early stages of the game, with Trinity’s Jack Freudenthal doing the damage. Freudenthal scored a pair of first quarter touchdowns en route to a 122-yard, three-touchdown night on the ground that also included 145 yards on six catches. The early scoring powered TES to a 13-3 halftime lead and was one of the biggest differences between the teams’ first meeting and this one — the Wake Forest-bound Freudenthal wasn’t even a running back in September.
“I thought it was a great decision because I wanted the ball in my hands,” Freudenthal said. “Normally I played slot and putting me at running back got me more touches — last time we played them I got two catches. It led to great plays and we drove the ball.”
STAB’s offense committed a host of errors as well that made life tough on the Saints’ defense, with four interceptions and a fumble. Those five costly turnovers including a handful in the redzone that created major issues for STAB.
“The one thing we talked before the game was that we needed to be able to block and tackle and not turn the ball over well I don’t know how much of any of them we did well tonight,” Blake said.
The most devastating of those turnovers came after Jalen Harrison unleashed a 65-yard kick return on the opening kick of the second half that put the Saints inside the 20. Trinity picked off a pass on second down and squashed the momentum STAB had picked up with Harrison’s play.
The Saints managed to pull within 10 early in the fourth quarter on a one yard plunge by quarterback Lee Parkhill that Harrison set up with a 34-yard catch and run that put the ball on the one. But an onsides kick attempt rolled out of bounds on the ensuing kickoff and Trinity went to work on grinding out the clock. STAB managed to get the ball back with 6:53 left and the ball at its own five. After edging out of the shadow of their own goal posts with a couple of penalties, Justin Jasper stepped in and intercepted a pass, racing down inside the 10.
STAB’s defense stood tall and forced a field goal that Trinity missed, but with little time left and the Saints’ offense still sputtering it wasn’t enough. Trinity closed out the game in victory formation and wrapped up the school’s first-ever state title.
“This is the mountaintop,” Freudenthal said. “Freshman year we were bad, sophomore year we made it to states but we didn’t know how to win, junior year we didn’t have the leaders on the team and now my senior year we have five seniors and we were just ready. I couldn’t be happier.”
Trinity quarterback Blake Bowen finished with 211 yards through the air on 12-for-20 passing and just one interception. The Saints got a monster game from Campbell Miller at tight end with 102 yards on four catches and another productive performance from Kareem Johnson who had 61 yards on five catches. Lee Parkhill also threw for 211 yards, but four interceptions by a ball-hawking Trinity defense erased the Saints’ passing attack’s effectiveness.
The loss ended a tremendous season for the Saints, who are just two years removed from 2012’s 0-10 campaign that featured a number of this year’s juniors and seniors as freshmen and sophomores. The Saints bounced back and made the playoffs last year and set the table for this year’s run, a 10-2 campaign that ended at the hands of the Titans.
