Seabreeze football team picks up its first 'W'

With a new quarterback and a new offense, the Sandcrabs rallied to a 29-15 victory at Atlantic

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For the first time as a head coach, Seabreeze’s Mike Klein was doused with Gatorade.

“I had a feeling they might get me, but I’ll take it. I’ll take it,” Klein said after the Sandcrabs defeated Atlantic 29-15 on the road on Thursday, Oct. 3, for their first win of the season.

“Oh, it feels amazing,” senior offensive lineman Mike Cloer said of tasting victory for the first time this year. “It’s a little later than when we expected, a little later than we were hoping, but it’s never too late. The best part about it is that we we feel like our work's finally paying off.”

After losing their first four games, the players were dejected but they never stopped working hard, they said.

“We've been staying the course, and it's real easy to get down or it's real easy to think we're doing all this work and we’re not seeing the result,” Klein said. “But the coaches, our staff, are doing a great job of continuing to coach hard, to continue to press our guys, and our guys are doing a great job of continuing to rise up.”

They rose up in the second half. After turning the ball over four times in the first half, they went into the locker room trailing 15-9 as Bennie Garnett scored on two 70-plus-yard touchdown runs for the Sharks. But the Sandcrabs controlled the ball in the second half with their new offense and scored on three straight possessions.

Senior Brogan Kelly scored the first touchdown of his career on an 18-yard run to open the scoring in the first quarter. Seabreeze also took advantage of a high snap for a first-half safety. In the second half, running back Jeremias George ran in for a touchdown and Dylan Tocci, playing his second game at quarterback, ran for two scores.

Tocci said he found out he would be the new quarterback on Saturday, Sept. 21, the day after the Sandcrabs lost to Matanzas. With Tocci moving behind center and former quarterback Zach Voltaire moving to slot, the Sandcrabs transitioned to more of a spread offense with other players also changing roles.

“Like the old saying goes, it's insanity, right, if you continue to do the same things and expect different results,” Klein said. “So we just tried to change some things up, put some guys into some better spots and we did have to move some guys tonight as well, because of some injuries throughout the game.”

Because of weather and a short week, Tocci said he has only had a few practices the past two weeks to work on his mechanics and get reps with the new offense.

“It was a lot to learn, it’s been a lot of work, but I like it,” he said. “They said they needed someone to lead the team and I accepted the role immediately, because I felt we needed a change on this team. And obviously it worked. The coaches helped me day in and day out prepare for this game.”

The Sandcrabs primarily kept the ball on the ground, and the key to their second-half success, Klein said, was the offensive line.

“I think the the offensive line played their tails off,” he said. “I mean we were able to run the ball inside, outside, sometimes against the five-man front. And when you've got a five-man front to be able to still pound the rock inside like we did tonight, that's offensive line. Those guys really played hard.”

Cloer, the offensive line captain, said he was proud of his line mates.

“I've even got to give credit to the H-backs, the F-backs. Brogan blocks, Tocci runs through everything. Jeremias runs through everything. In some ways everyone’s the offensive line," Cloer said. "Everyone has that mentality of we got to attack. I'm so happy, and I'm so proud of this team for that reason.”

Cloer lifted Kelly in the air after he scored the first touchdown. Kelly lifted Coach Klein after the victory.

“We needed to win for coach, especially, and we needed to win for ourselves because we were all down in the dumps,” Kelly said. “A couple of us still had our chins held high, but other than that, a lot of us were down in the dumps struggling with the fact that we were 0-4.

But it would have been easy, Cloer said, for the players to stop hitting the weight room. That never happened.

“We've been conditioning, we've been hitting the weight room, and we finally see our progress,” he said. "And the best part about it is that we know that the mid-season turnaround is still possible. We're not eliminated out of the playoffs yet. Our season's not finite yet. We're going to celebrate this first for 24 hours, the first win. And then it's just business, business, business. Let's win the next game. Celebrate. Let's keep doing it as long as we can.”

 

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