LYNN — Those who witnessed Saturday’s KIPP-Manchester Essex football game could be excused if they returned home with stiff necks.
It was the football equivalent of a tennis match. Back and forth … back and forth. When it ended, the Hornets hung on by the slimmest of margins, 41-40, over KIPP.
Whatever happens with the Commonwealth Conference/Small race (the loss dampened the Panthers’ hopes for a league title), KIPP can look forward to the postseason tournament. The Panthers, seeded No. 7 in Division 8, play their first-round game against No. 10 Sutton.
Saturday’s game was a less-than-satisfying ending for KIPP coach Jim Rabbitt, who thought his team really didn’t show up Saturday.
“We didn’t come to play,” he said. “We didn’t have a good week of practice, and I told the guys that you can’t just show up and not be ready to play. We weren’t good on defense at all.”
Still, the Panthers tried desperately to hang in there, and even took a lead (40-34) late in the fourth quarter. But a poor kickoff after the touchdown gave the Hornets a short field, and they ended up scoring the winning touchdown on Beckett Walker’s 11-yard run with 1:38 to go.
“I don’t deny our pluck,” Rabbitt said. “But we kept putting ourselves in bad positions, and this is what happens.”
Also, he admitted, “we don’t have a kicker. We have some holes in this team.”
There were other, more conventional, reasons KIPP lost Saturday. The biggest one was the Hornets’ powerful ground game. A trio of backs – Stephen Martin, Quinn Brady and Kevin McKenna – torched KIPP for 392 total yards on the ground. The tough-to-bring-down Martin led the way with 215 yards and two touchdowns. McKenna and Walker also scored two touchdowns.
For KIPP, quarterback Chanel Gutierrez did all he could to keep the Panthers in the game, throwing for 262 yards and three touchdowns while rushing for another.
“We scored most of our touchdowns on big plays,” Rabbitt said. “We have some very good athletes, but we didn’t do much when it came to sustained drives.”
The volleying began immediately, with Martin completing an eight-play, 60-yard drive with a 2-yard plunge. It was one of several Manchester touchdowns that came after being given a short field by KIPP (the Panthers began several drives with excellent field position as well, however).
KIPP came right back with a drive of its own – one of its only real sustained drives of the afternoon. Morenel Castro finished it off with a 20-yard completion from Gutierrez, giving the Panthers an 8-6 lead with the conversion.
That didn’t last long. McKenna, who kept burning the Panthers with sweeps to the left, broke one off for 15 yards that, with the conversion, made it 14-8 Hornets.
On the first play of the second quarter, Castro stripped Mac Edgerton of the ball and ran it back 51 yards for the game-tying touchdown. But Manchester ran off a 10-play drive that started on its own 25, with McKenna fumbling on the 1-foot line only two have a teammate recover in the end zone. Brady ran in the conversion to make it 22-14.
Almost immediately, Edgerton picked off Gutierrez and ran it back 55 yards to make it 28-14.
Before you could say “the rout was on,” however, KIPP came roaring back. Gutierrez hit Jose Echavarria with a 50-yard pass to make it 28-20 by halftime.
KIPP crept to within two, 28-26, when Gutierrez found Castro in the flat, and the speedy back did the rest, combining for a 60-yard scoring play.
But the Hornets settled things down with a five-play, 63-yard drive culminating in Martin’s 41-yard run to make it 34-26.
After a Gutierrez interception, Jovan Machado dove in from the 2-yard line to make the score 34-32, and with 5:05 left, Gutierrez took off for 35 yards, and scored the conversion, to put KIPP ahead, 40-34.
But starting from the KIPP 47 (after a procedure penalty negated a much deeper kickoff), Manchester milked the clock for 10 plays before Walker’s 4-yard run made it 41-40 with 1:38 to go.
