LYNN — Classical coach Brian Vaughan saw his son laid out on the Manning Field turf. He could tell there was something wrong.
Then, young Brian Vaughan got up gingerly, helped by two teammates. and he left the field with his left ankle dangling. It did not look good.
Vaughan had two distinctly different trains of thought at that point. First, Vaughan is his starting quarterback. He had to think football at that moment.
But Vaughan is also a father. And he had to think like a father at that point too.
“As a coach, you’re just thinking of the situation,” he said, after his team defeated English, 17-14, thanks to a six-yard field goal in overtime by Kyle Durant. “A lot of the stuff we’d prepared for immediately went out the window.
“If you know us, and you’ve seen us play, you know our offense flows through the quarterback,” Vaughan said. “We do a lot with him.”
But what about the father in him?
‘You see it, and you know there’s nothing you can do,” he said. ‘I didn’t have a lot of time to think about it because the game was going on, and I had to worry about what we’re going to do to make up for it.”
The verdict, Vaughan found out later, was that his son has a “very bad” high ankle sprain.
“That’s about the best news we could get,” said Vaughan. “We thought it was broken. But my wife (Anne) texted me from the hospital. I’m happy for him. Maybe now he’ll have a chance to play hoops. That would kill him if he couldn’t.”
Not only was Vaughan’s absence felt on offense, but he is the free safety on defense, “and he does a very good job there,” his father said. With him out of the picture, the Rams had to regroup on defense too. They did. Durant, who was everywhere all day, stepped in front of two passes that would have been long gainers for the Bulldogs had they been caught. And freshman Emil Bruno picked a pass off to quash an English drive.
However, the spotlight was on Durant. His statistics may look rather pedestrian coming out of the game, but his job wasn’t to accumulate them. It was to manage the game. And he did that, and then some.
Even so, Durant has had limited action in games, even though he did reps in practice. He felt himself ready, but without Vaughan, the Rams couldn’t do the passing plays they did with him.
“It just eliminated the passing,” his father said. “Some screens, and a lot of the vertical stuff we just couldn’t do,” he said.
Still, Durant left his footprint, as well as his fingerprints, on the game.
“He’s been our backup all year,” Coach Vaughan said. “He’s one of our best athletes. and he’s done everything we’ve asked him to do. He’s had to play very unselfishly, and he has.
Durant, as with his game-winning field goal (“I was asking to kick it,” he said), was unfazed and ready.
‘I never felt nervous, he said. ‘Thankfully, I was able to step up and get it done. I really wanted the moment.”
