Montrose players celebrate their win on Thursday. More photos. (Ryan Casey/CHSAANow.com)
GRAND JUNCTION — All week — shoot, all summer — Montrose heard about how bad it was going to be this season, about how the loss of last year’s seniors would decimate the team.
On Thursday, as the Indians opened Colorado’s high school football season in Zero Week with a matchup against nearby Fruita Monument, they set out to prove everyone wrong.
Only, they went three-and-out on their first drive. And then Fruita Monument promptly marched down the field and took a 7-0 lead.
“Here’s this inexperienced team,” Montrose coach Jim Scarry would say later, “what’s going to happen? How are you going to respond to adversity?”
Well, Montrose went down and scored. 7-7.
“And all of a sudden,” Scarry said, the thought on the sideline became, “OK, we’re going to get this done.”
Added quarterback Caleb Egbert: “We weren’t just going to fall over and die and just let them run over us.”
Montrose beat Fruita Monument 33-27 on Thursday night at Stocker Stadium, the second consecutive win over the Wildcats and coach Todd Casbier, who coached Montrose for 10 seasons before joining Fruita Monument in 2015.
As usual, Montrose got it done on the ground. Egbert, a junior, had three rushing scores, and running back Riley Freeland went wild — rushing for 277 yards and a touchdown on 27 carries.
Montrose’s Riley Freeland. More photos. (Ryan Casey/CHSAANow.com)
“Riley got quite a bit of experience last year, but had never been the guy,” Scarry said. “Now he is the guy, and he stepped up and played like the guy.”
After tying the game at 7 with that big response of a drive late in the first quarter, Montrose then went up 13-7 early in the second when Freeland broke free for an 80-yard score.
Fruita answered with a touchdown pass from sophomore Zach Rush to Danial Van Hoose, but Montrose’s Mason Weig took the ensuring kickoff 95 yards for a score and a 20-14 lead midway through the second quarter.
“I saw a seam and I took it,” Weig said, “and didn’t look back.”
Things stayed that way until late in the third, when Montrose put together a long drive and capped it with a one-yard touchdown from Egbert.
Fruita responded with a one-yard score from Logan Triplett, his second of the night. But Montrose — again — had a clock-draining drive that ended with a short touchdown from Egbert with 5:26 remaining in the game.
And still, Fruita came back at Montrose. The Wildcats got another touchdown pass from Rush, this to Kyle Fineran, who made a leaping grab in the end zone. It was 33-27, and 3:30 remained.
Fruita then stopped Montrose on fourth-and-4 at the 37-yard-line, and took over with 42 seconds to play.
The Wildcats drove down and had a pass into the end zone on the game’s final play, but it fell incomplete.
“We won the last play,” Scarry said. “Thank goodness.”
It sent off a crazy celebration on the Montrose sideline, an atypical scene for a Zero Week win.
“I think we were all pretty angry that people were doubting us,” Egbert said. “We didn’t want to be the people that are considered underdogs and not going to win anything. We wanted to prove everybody wrong.”
Said Weig, a junior: “We had heard a lot — even from the community — just thinking that they were going to get a running clock. We took it to heart.”
Scarry gathered his players after the game, and addressed that doubt head on.
“They have heard it,” he said afterward. “I mean, I’ve heard it: ‘Oh, it’s going to be a down year. You lost a lot of seniors.’ Hey, you know, I’ve seen them practice, but until you see it in the game, that’s a whole different story. They responded in the correct way.”
More photos. (Ryan Casey/CHSAANow.com)