Lightning 18
Lakers 13
The Hunting Hills Lightning survived a late push by the Sylvan Lake Lakers to come out on top 18-13 on Friday night at Setters Place.
With the win, the Lightning improved to 2-0, meanwhile, the Lakers fall to 0-2 early in the Central Alberta High School Football League.
Hunting Hills head coach Kyle Sedgwick said they knew Sylvan was going to play hard and were ready for it.
"I thought we started really well and played fast. Then we had a couple of guys go down with injury and we just went down. Credit to them they played physically and they kicked our butt for a quarter and a half in the first half," he said.
"We needed this win. Last week, Camrose was good but we needed Sylvan to come and hit us in the mouth and they did. This is going to help us moving forward."
After the Lightning’s defence stood strong in the opening series, the offence took advantage and scored on their opening drive on a rushing touchdown by Cooper Niedermaier who beat the defenders to the outside.
They missed the extra point but later in the quarter, Hunting Hills put themselves in scoring position with a great punt return that put them in the red zone.
However, they failed to punch it in and settled for a field goal.
The Lakers finally got on the board late in the second quarter when quarterback Jace Martins ran it in with just under two minutes left in the half after they marched down the field.
The rest of the quarter belonged to Sylvan Lake as their defence came up clutch with an important interception the next series.
That led to a touchdown pass from Martins to Jayden McLean who ran up the left side of the field and broke a few tackles before making it into the end zone with 21 seconds remaining. The extra point game the Lakers a 13-9 lead at halftime.
Lightning came out swinging to begin the second half.
They got into scoring position off a big reception by Niedermaier. After a couple of failed attempts to run it in, receiver Kimi Olugbenjo came down with the ball off a pass on the left side of the end zone. After the extra point, the Lightning led 16-13.
A kneel in the end zone later in the game gave the Lightning two more points to extend their lead 18-13 in the fourth quarter.
After a few unsuccessful drives, the Lakers got the ball back one more time with 50 seconds left but the Lightning came up with a game-clinching interception.
