Photo by Aaron Crutchfield - Atascadero’s Tanner Thompson gets into the end zone for a touchdown during the Greyhounds’ 33-21 win over Clovis East on Friday.

Once the Atascadero High School varsity football team stopped getting burned by the big play, it was smooth sailing in what ended up as a 33-21 win over Clovis East on Friday.

The Timberwolves started the game with a 75-yard touchdown run on the first play from scrimmage, in which Sean Johnson-Bey appeared to be stopped in the pile but emerged from the back of it and went down the sideline for the score. Clovis East also had a 41-yard run on its next possession to set up a touchdown and a 54-yard pass play for a score in the first half to take a 21-14 lead into halftime.

But the Greyhounds kept the Timberwolves off the scoreboard for the entire second half, allowing the offense to score 19 unanswered points.

“We didn’t change too much up,” Atascadero coach Vic Cooper said of the adjustments during halftime. “We just hit them with their own game. They’re a team that’s going to pound you and pound you and wear you out and win the games in the fourth quarter. They were set up for that pretty good and we pretty much reversed fortune on them. In the end, our conditioning and toughness won out over theirs. I think by the end of that game they were spent.”

Although the defense didn’t get on track until the second half, the Atascadero offense looked to be farther along than one might expect for an opening-week game. On the team’s second possession, a pair of passing plays, for 30 and nine yards, helped open up some running room for Tanner Thompson to run for 27 yards on six carries and Tanner Kuhnle to run for 18 yards on three carries. Thompson capped the drive with a two-yard touchdown run with 3:54 left in the first quarter, and Joey Dodds’ point-after kick tied the score at 7-7.

For the complete article see the 09-09-2009 issue.

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