The Cochrane High School Cobras took on the biting cold, and the No. 1-ranked Crescent Heights High School Vikings of Medicine Hat, and came out on top.
After spotting the Vikings 14 points, the Cobras ramped up the venom and went on a 32-point run to defeat Crescent Heights 32-16 in provincial high school Tier 3 quarter-final action Nov. 10 at Calgary’s Shouldice Park.
Temperature at kickoff for the early-evening contest was a hostile -18 C (feels like -80), prompting Cobras team statistician Vern Friesen to pull on his tuque at half-time.
But the Cobras players were oblivious.
Quarterback Cody Stevens’s passes had their trademark vapor trails on them, as he was spinning the ball into the evening chill with a sniper’s precision. And his receivers weren’t suffering nearly the dropsies they did the week before in Cochrane’s 16-14 win over Calgary’s Rundle College.
“It started off a little bit slow, but then we kind of found our rhythm and got back to it,” said Stevens, who was running a balanced attack with Justin Mount and Josh Gingrich-Hadley on the ground and Kyle Moortgat and Nik Noseworthy through the air. “We’ve been working on a good balance. The weather was obviously a factor and we didn’t know how well we were going to throw, and we started running it more in practice.”
But Stevens was right on target through the air, hitting a wide-open Kyle Moortgat with a 40-yard strike before Moortgat’s 50-yard burst following the catch would put him in the endzone for a 90-yard score that effectively beached the Vikings with 9:32 left in the third quarter.
Prior to that play, the Vikings had blocked a Travis Chase punt and were threatening to score from Cochrane’s 15-yard-line. But a Mac Chaisson recovery of a Vikings fumble put the ball in Stevens’s hands, and he immediately hit Moortgat on the game’s longest TD play to put the Cobras ahead 19-14.
“We stopped them, and then we got the fumble and that’s when we threw that go-ahead touchdown,” Cobras defensive coordinator Bruce O’Neil observed.
“Totally, totally,” O’Neil said when asked if that was the turning point of the game. “It could have gone their way. They block the punt; if they score, all of a sudden we’re down ourselves.
“That was the turning point.”
Moortgat, on a 20-yard end-around; Stevens, on a one-yard dive; Justin Mount on a 55- yard sprint and Josh Gingrich-Hadley on a 40-yard rumble rounded out the Cobras scoring.
CHS now plays the Churchill Bulldogs of Lethbridge Nov. 17 at Shouldice Park in the Tier 3 provincial semifinal, 4:30 kickoff.