PEABODY — The Peabody football team bounced back with a statement Friday night at Coley Lee Field.
After a shutout loss to Revere last week, the Tanners dominated from start to finish in a 34-0 win over Gloucester.
Junior running back Kyle Maglione scored the first of his two touchdowns with 59 seconds left in the first quarter, and Peabody never looked back. The Tanners scored twice in the third quarter, and twice in the fourth quarter to keep Gloucester winless at 0-3. Peabody improves to 2-1.
Coach Mark Bettencourt liked the way his team came out hard and fast against Gloucester, but he didn’t like seeing nine yellow flags come down against his team, costing Peabody 85 yards.
“We talked about coming out with more fire tonight, and we did, Gloucester has some tough kids, they’re traditionally a tough team from a tough town, and they’re still like that,” Bettencourt said. “Gloucester is a young team, but they’re very tough, they’re going to keep getting better, and I knew we had our hands full, coming off a bad week last week, so we had to motivate our team to come out and play hard, they did, but we took way too many penalties.
“That’s definitely one of the things that we’re going to work on cleaning up this week, we’ve got four really tough games coming up, and when Danvers comes here next week, we can’t get penalties like we did (Friday) and expect to beat them,” the coach added. “We struggled a bit offensively in the first half, but defensively we did a nice job on them, and our offense came around in the second half.”
With a 7-0 lead, Peabody got the ball to start the second half, and nine plays later, Colby Therrien took it in from the four to boost the lead to 13-0. Joseph Swanton booted one of his four PAT kicks, and it was 14-0.
Peabody got the ball back when Brandon Caniff swiped a Sam Ciolino pass on the Tanner five-yard line, squashing a Fishermen threat. Tanners quarterback Alex Denisco hit back Angel Paulino with a 28-yard pass, and then a 16-yard connection to put the ball deep in Gloucester territory. Maglione scored his second touchdown on the eighth play of the drive, this one from six yards out, for a 20-0 lead after three quarters.
Frederick Koffi and Dylan Peluso each ran one home in the fourth quarter to account for the 34-0 final.
“It was very important for us to come out and score after the bad game we had against Revere last week, we stuck together and pulled it out,” Maglione said. “The coaches put in a great game plan for us, and we stayed strong as a team and got a big win we needed.”
