Genesee County unkind to Green Devils

Brown City’s Tyler Banks made a catch for the 2-point conversion against Genesee at Genesee last Friday. GENESEE — With its last Michigan High School Athletic Association playoff appearance coming Oct. 29, 1999, with a 39-14 first-round loss to Bendle, the Brown City varsity football team (7-3 overall, 4-2 Greater Thumb Conference East) came into last Saturday’s initial postseason contest knowing it had a chance to do something special. As for Genesee (10-0, 6-0 Genesee Area Conference-Blue), tournament play is becoming more and more familiar after qualifying for a shot at the state championship three of the past four years.

The Green Devils were at Genesee last weekend for a Div. 7 round-one playoff contest, falling, 43- 8. After both teams were unable to light up the scoreboard in the first quarter, the Wolves’ offense finally began to find the chinks in the armor of the Brown City defense to take a 16-0 lead into halftime. After the break Genesee’s offensive assault picked up right where it left off, outscoring the Green Devils, 12-8 and 15-0 in the third and fourth quarters to secure the win.

“Genesee played with more intensity than we did. We didn’t take advantage of a couple of early opportunities and found ourselves down at halftime,” said Brown City coach Scott Banks. We trimmed the lead to 22-8 mid-third quarter but Genesee answered our score on the following kickoff and we never recovered. They have a pretty good quarterback and we were not able to contain him. Our kids played hard today and have all season. I’m proud of them, as is our community. Hopefully we can learn from this and continue to improve our football program.”

The story of the night for Genesee was Garrett Cook’s emergence as an offensive jugernaut, running the ball 19 times for 112 yards and three touchdowns, while completing 9-of-21 pass attempts for 173 yards and a pair of scores. The signal caller even managed to contribute to the special teams by reaching the endzone on an 85-yard kickoff return.

Offensively, Brown City did try and mount a comeback at the end of the first half after Cook had given the Wolves a two-touchdown lead on runs of three and 40 yards, but its efforts sputtered to an early halt at the Genesee five-yard line when the clock expired. In the second half the Green Devils did manage to get themselves on the board with a three-yard Kevin Kalbfleisch jaunt, which they followed with a succesful two-point conversion pass to Tyler Banks, but only after Cook notched his third score to put Genesee up, 22-0.

Cook then rounded out the scoring with a triumverate of touchdowns, including a 27-yard scoring strike to Donovan Aleman

Topping the charts for the Green Devils was Natham Primeau with five carries for 55 yards, Corie Soucie was held to a dozen yards on seven attempts and chipping in with six carries for 19 yards was Kalbfleisch. Also working his way into the mix was quarterback Trenton Wood, completing 3-of-7 passes for 87 yards. In total Brown City ran the ball 35 times for 131 yards, clocked seven first downs and lost one of their three fumbles. They were also penalized three times for 25 yards.

On the other side of the ball, Kalbfleisch took out his aggression to the tune of 16 tackles, Tyler Foster and Travis Yonkowski made eight defensive stops each and making six tackles and recovering a fumble was Casey Martus.

Brown City actually came into this game with a fair amount of momentum, having won its last two games of the season by a combined 85-21. The last time the Green Devils took a playoff victory was 1997, beating Deckerville, 6-0, and Grosse Pointe Woods University Liggett, 34-0, before finally losing to Decatur. 30-0. They’ll end 2009 ranked 320th in the state and 8,621st nationally according to maxpreps. com as of Nov. 3, having allowed 148 points on the year while scoring 349.

For some of the athletes, this was their final time roaming the high school gridiron, including Green Devil seniors Steven Wright (T/DT), Josh Moffitt (E/DE), Tyler Amador (T/DT), Foster (G/LB), Mike Angerbrandt (E/DT), Jake Rayba (G/DT), Jake Mittlestat (T/DE), Justin Reinthaler (T/DT), Ben Seidell (E/C), Stewart Peterson (RB/LB), Soucie (RB/C)and Kalbfleisch (RB/S).

Next up for Genesee is a battle of the unbeatens against Ubly (10-0, 6-0 GTC-East) this Friday in the district finals. In 2008 the Bearcats made it all the way to the championship game, falling at the hands of Traverse City Central, 41-13, after defeating Genesee, 65-6, Dryden, 46-8, Royal Oak Shrine Catholic, 32-14, and Reading, 47-8. The winner of that game will then move on to regionals Nov. 13-14 against whoever is left standing after Detroit Loyola plays Petersberg Summerfield this weekend.