After a year hiatus from one of the area’s most intense rivalries, Mount Carmel (3-1) and Southern Columbia (4-0) will go at it once again tonight at Tiger Stadium.
The rivalry has been one-sided over the last decade, as the Tigers have won the last 11 meetings by an average margin of 34.6 points.
However, the Red Tornadoes are coming off a statement win, 28-7, over defending District 4 Class 3A runner-up Montoursville, while Southern needed a flawless second half to rally from a 17-point halftime deficit against Wyoming Area.
“With the kind of year Mount Carmel is having, and the way things went with us last week, I think the current situation adds a little more to it,” Southern coach Jim Roth said. “They were able to do pretty much anything they wanted to against a really good Montoursville team last week, which got our attention as a team. They’re a pretty good football team right now. We’re going to see a lot of the same stuff we saw last week, and we’re going to have to play better from the start.
“With all that, this game might have a little more hype around it than our past few meetings with them.”
“This is a huge game for us,” Mount Carmel coach John Darrah added. “Besides last year, we’ve played them twice most of the past few years, so it’s a team we’re real familiar with, and they’re familiar with us. We’re always trying to get over that hump every time we play them, and that’s no different this time around.”
Guided by a game-high 139 rushing yards from first-year quarterback Pedro Feliciano, Mount Carmel was able to keep Montoursville’s potent offense off the field for over two-thirds of the contest by racking up a whopping 24 first downs.
Julien Stellar added 70 yards and two touchdowns on 18 carries, and Michael Farronato had 78 yards and a score on 12 touches.
“We’ve always had a run-heavy offense,” Darrah said. “We’re always going to try to control the time of possession and get a lot of first downs to chew up the clock. It’s easier to do that this year because we have more one-way guys that stay fresher, which makes it easier to do what we want to do on both sides of the ball.
“Our kids always have high expectations, and they’ve worked extremely hard. We were kind of waiting for a game like (Montoursville). We knew we had some potential, but there were a couple instances earlier in the year where we had some self-inflicted wounds. So, we were really waiting for a game to put it all together and eliminate those mistakes, and we did that for the most part against Montoursville. It was definitely a good win and a confidence booster for our kids.”
At Wyoming Area, Southern was without two members of its lethal backfield trio, as Braeden Wisloski was nursing an injury suffered the previous week while fullback Wes Barnes was sidelined for much of the contest with an injury that occurred mid-game.
That allowed the Warriors to key on Kent State recruit Gavin Garcia.
The Tigers were left with little choice other than to be one-dimensional on offense, but Garcia still managed to be Southern’s savior, running for four touchdowns in his squad’s second-half resurgence. He finished with 259 yards on 23 carries, both career-bests. He also caught a 28-yard touchdown pass in the first quarter and contributed 16 tackles on defense.
“He played a major role in us being able to come back in the second half and get the win,” Roth said of his star running back. “We leaned on Gavin more, and he was able to respond. They pretty much knew he was going to get the ball every play, but between the offensive line and their blocking and his ability to run, we were still able to have success staying one-dimensional with him. It was a very impressive effort on his part.”
Roth expects Wisloski and Barnes to be healthy enough to play in some capacity against the Red Tornadoes. He also thinks his players will use last week’s first-half struggles as both a wake-up call and a lesson to learn from moving forward.
“With the way the Wyoming Area game went, it should make it that much easier to be focused and ready and go out and play at a high level from the beginning,” he said. “At the end of the day, they’re high school players, and none of the kids on our team now have ever lost a game. It gets to the point where they think they can’t lose because there’s a lot of noise out there, but they just have to stay focused and block out the outside noise in order to take care of the tasks at hand.”
