Dolphins Feel Right at Home

Harris Rushes for Two Scores and Defense Comes Up Big in 14-12 Win

The scenario at halftime was all too familiar for the Palisades High varsity football team. For the third time in as many games this season, the Dolphins trailed going into the locker room last Friday night and once again the deficit was due to their own lack of execution. However, senior quarterback Dylan Cohen pointed out what he believed to be a weakness in the opponent’s defense and pointed it out during the chalk talk. To their credit, the coaches listened, and junior running back Andre Harris did the rest. ‘I let the coaches know that the two hole and four hole were open and we could run it right down their throats all night,’ Cohen said. ‘Before the first play [of the second half] I told Andre he was gonna’ get the ball and he did his thing from there.’ That ‘thing’ was a spectacular 72-yard touchdown run on the Dolphins’ first play from scrimmage which gave the Dolphins a lead they would never relinquish on their way to a 14-12 nonleague victory over Los Angeles at Stadium by the Sea. Harris ran roughshod through the Romans, gaining 210 yards in just 10 carries. He broke tackles repeatedly, frustrated would-be tacklers with stiff straight arms and dragged defenders with him for extra yardage. ‘Yeah, he was hard to tackle,’ Romans’ defensive back Patrick Morrison said of Harris. ‘Several times we thought we had him trapped and he escaped.’ Harris scored Pali’s first offensive touchdown in nearly 10 quarters on a 58-yard run up the middle that gave the Dolphins a short-lived 7-6 lead with 2:08 remaining in the first half. ‘We had to win this game and I felt I had to pick the team up,’ Harris said. ‘The turning point was that first possession of the third quarter. We may have been down, but we kept telling each other we were still in the game and we could still win.’ Marquise Coleman added 36 yards in seven carries for Palisades (1-2). When senior linebacker Dave Villalobos made a juggling interception, Pali appeared poised to take a one-point lead into halftime, but defensive end Maynard Walker intercepted a slant pass by Cohen at midfield and returned it to the Dolphins’ six-yard line. Morrison plowed off right tackle on the next play to give L.A. a 12-7 lead. ‘At that point, I kept thinking to myself ‘Here we go again,” said Leo Castro, who earned his first victory in three tries as the Dolphins’ head coach. ‘We were dropping passes, dropping easy interceptions, taking silly penalties. Nothing was going right. But the great thing about football is that each game presents you with many opportunities and in the second half we were able to capitalize on a few of them.’ A running into the kicker penalty gave Los Angeles an automatic first down to keep its opening drive alive, but the Romans’ eventually turned the ball over on downs. The ensuing drive ended when Pali wide receiver Anthony Anaebere dropped a sure touchdown pass after sneaking behind the L.A. secondary. Early in the second quarter, Brandon Bryant’s errant snap sailed five feet over Cohen’s head and, after retrieving the loose ball, the Pali punter was gang-tackled at the Dolphins’ 1-yard line. Raymond Mouton’s quarterback sneak gave Los Angeles a 6-0 lead on the next play. ‘That was all my fault,’said Bryant, who had predicted the Dolphins’ offense would bust loose in front of its home crowd. ‘I got a little too overanxious and just hiked it over Dylan’s head. We struggled, I struggled, but we battled back. No team can stop us, we can only stop ourselves.’ Los Angeles (1-2) advanced to the Dolphins’ 12-yard line with five minutes left but Bryant atoned for his earlier miscue with a leaping interception. On their last drive, the Romans marched to the Palisades 36 before Anaebere picked off a pass by Christian Martinez and returned it 40 yards with 43 seconds left. Cohen completed just one pass for six yards, threw two interceptions and missed a 28-yard field goal, but no one was happier when the game was over. ‘This was a huge win,’ Cohen said. ‘We had to have this game. It doesn’t matter to me how we do it, as long as we come out on top in the end.’ Pali players were inspired throughout the game by a trio of alumni looking on from the sideline: former quarterback and Palisadian-Post Cup Award-winner Carlos Flores (Class of ’99), former tight end/defensive back Stamen Borisov (Class of ’99) and former tight end/defensive end Melvin Hayes (Class of ’98). ‘I was pretty confident the whole time that we’d come back and win,’ said Flores, who played quarterback at Virginia Union, a Division II college, and now works as a bodyguard for a management company. ‘But towards the end it was a little shaky. But I’m proud of the guys for hanging in there and pulling it out.’ Frosh/Soph Sophomore receiver Javon Crowder caught touchdown passes of 40 and 45 yards from quarterback Michael Latt and also scored on a reverse’all in the first half’as the host Dolphins (1-1-1) posted a 21-6 victory.