Terry Fox Ravens junior varsity quarterback Key’Shaun Dorsey rewarded his coach’s confidence in him by leading the senior team to a 35-21 victory over the Notre Dame Jugglers in their BC Secondary Schools Football Association Subway Bowl quarter-final, Saturday at BC Place Stadium.
It seems there’s something magical about Grade 10 quarterbacks and the Ravens.
Last year it was junior varsity pivot Stu Phillips who was able to step in for a hobbled Jevaun Jacobsen and then platoon the Ravens to within a second of repeating as Subway Bowl champions.
This year Terry Fox head coach Martin McDonnell again reached down into the junior squad late in the season when the senior team’s starting quarterback, Matt Lew-Hendrickson, was battered and bruised.
“He’s a good kid,” McDonnell said of Lew-Hendrickson’s understudy. “We thought having both of them in there would give us a bit of an advantage.”
Especially as it allowed Lew-Hendrickson to play his more accustomed position — receiver — from which he was plucked at the beginning of the season when both Jacobsen and Phillips didn’t return.
In fact, it was a 38-yard catch by Lew-Hendrickson that he was able to take to the two-yard line which set up a scamper into the end zone by running back Cade Cote that tied the game at 7-7 after the Jugglers had taken an early lead.
Dorsey and Lew-Hendrickson teamed up again just before halftime when the junior quarterback tossed the ball to the senior pilot who then threw it back to Dorsey who ran it down the sideline and into the end zone to put Terry Fox in front, 14-7 with just eight seconds left until the break.
The Ravens rode the momentum of that play into the second half and early in the third quarter, Terry Fox increased its margin when Cade Cote bolted 75 yards into the end zone. Two minutes after that, Jaden Severy scored on a 47-yard run to make it 27-7.
Notre Dame got some life when receiver Jerrell Cummings out-leaped Fox defender Kaiden Parks in the end zone to pull down a strike from Jugglers’ quarterback Will Clarke.
But another 75-yard run down the sideline for a major, this time by Severy, extinguished any spark Notre Dame might have gotten from their score as the Ravens went up 35-14.
Jugglers’ running back Teon Alexander-Amour did score on a seven-yard run to make it 35-21 with four minutes left in the fourth quarter, but an interception by the Raven’s Kyle Huish two minutes later sealed his team’s place in next week’s semifinal, where they’ll face the New Westminster Hyacks.
In Saturday’s earlier game, the Hyacks upset the previously undefeated Lord Tweedsmuir Panthers, 34-16, setting the stage for a rematch of last year’s Subway Bowl championship, when New West scored a dramatic 15-14 win on a last-second touchdown followed by a successful two-point conversion.
McDonnell said even though there’s a lot of new faces on this year’s Ravens, last year’s loss still stings.
“That will be motivation now,” McDonnell said as his team's strives for its third straight appearance in a Subway Bowl final. “We won’t have to say much.”
