Chaminade Football Thrashes Titans 31-12

If you’re going around looking for a little bit of redemption after a huge loss, going up against one of the better shot-callers in the Catholic League probably wouldn’t be your first choice.

Holy Trinity senior Chris Laviano, who has 757 yards on 67 completions out of 134 attempts and is ranked as the No. 1 quarterback in the league, definetly would not be your first choice.

But coming away withbeing able to put a 31-12 victory into your win column, you will take that any week during the regular season.

“The last few weeks we’ve been getting off to slow starts, verses Iona two weeks ago, verses St. Anthony’s last week and it was goot to just start off scoring on our first drive like that,” Chaminade starting QB Sean Cerrone (5/8, 138 yards) said. “It was good just to get all the feelings we had, a little frustration out in this game.”

Whereas the Flyers had found themselves down 17 points in the first quarter last week against the Friars, they dealt a similar dish to the Titans, putting 24 points on the board through their first 4 possessions in the first half while the defense held up a zero.

“They don’t care about how many carries they get, they just whatever’s asked of them and they’re great at it,” Chaminade head coach Steven Boyd said of the offense of Cerrone, RB Robert Speranza and FB Daniel Fowler (141 yards, 14 carries)

“You’ve got to give a lot of credit to Trinity and Chris Laviano, he’s a good quarterback so he found some holes and he made some great plays,” Boyd said. “He’s a really good football player and he caught us in some situations and we just went in at halftime and we just said ‘let’s look at the coverages we’re playing and we just had a kinda clean things up a little bit, that’s really it.”

It didn’t help matters that flags came raining down on the Flyers just as much as the precipitation on the field. Chaminade incurred 9 penalties in total, 5 alone on the final drive of the first quarter and another for unsportsmanlike conduct.

“I’m very upset because we teach our kids to play a certain way, to play hard and I think they are just some things we have to clean up,” Boyd said, “but keep your hands inside and we just got to keep working. We can’t have those penalties in crucial situations.”

Again, it didn’t matter with the defense clicking, keeping Holy Trinity off the board until just before the half and sacking Laviano six times – two each from linebackers Chris Powers, Brendan O’Callaghan and Brian Dunne.

“We thought we had it and then we got stuffed on 2,” Dunne said, referring to Chaminade’s lone loss this year to St. Anthony’s. “We just came out, practiced hard all week, trying to get a solid win and get back on track.”

Part of that practice was having senior quarterback Joe Anile doing his best imitation of Rutgers-bound Laviano in prep work for the defense.

But the Titans are too good to yield so easily, especially with Laviano at the helm, orchestrating a 16-play, 74-yard drive to put Holy Trinity on the board to eat up nearly 7 minutes from the clock and came back for an encore in the fourth, repeatedly getting the conversions to consume 6 minutes from the clock, but failed to score.

“Everyone knows Laviano, how good he is, it just gives you that much more motivation to actually get in and be like ‘yeah, I got him’,” said Dunne, who got his hands on the Holy Trinity senior twice for sacks, but may have injured his right shoulder in the process.

“I went back in, I was running and it just felt weird,” he said. “Laviano got out, I think he was scrambling, I didn’t want him to get the first down so I came over, hit him with my right shoulder, felt like a nice sting and got the wind kncked out of me. But I’ll be back for next week. I’ll be fine.”