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Tigers’ ‘D’ faces explosive team after layoff

Mirror file photo by Patrick Waksmunski Gus Dellinger (48) and the Hollidaysburg defense will have their hands full Friday night against Meadville.

It’s been nearly three weeks since the Hollidaysburg Area High School football team last played, and Golden Tigers coach Homer DeLattre has made good use of the time off.

Accurately predicting the Tigers’ opponent in the District 6-8-10 Class 5A championship game was going to be Meadville, DeLattre spent the interim preparing for the Bulldogs’ wing-T and one of the most productive running games in Pennsylvania gridiron annals.

“Three weeks, we’ve been working on the wing-T,” DeLattre said. “We did spend more time on Meadville than on Grove City the last two weeks. We started installing some wing-T concepts. We have quite a few videos on them. We did prepare more for Meadville on that two-week bye than we did for those other teams.”

Everyone will get to find out how the Tigers’ preparation pays off on Friday night, when Hollidaysburg — 6-4 after opening the season 1-4 — tries to snap Meadville’s 10-game winning streak while posting its first postseason win since 2008 at Slippery Rock University’s Mihalik-Thompson Stadium.

Kickoff is slated for 7 p.m.

Only one of Hollidaysburg’s last six opponents has cracked the 200-yard mark rushing. In fact, two haven’t even finished with positive yards. But that will be put to the test this week.

Meadville enters the contest averaging 476.4 yards per game on the ground. The Bulldogs have scored 70 points twice this year, beat Grove City, 67-27, in the subregional semifinal last week and haven’t put fewer than 36 points on the board in a game all season.

It’s not uncommon to see the best wing-T teams produce two 1,000-yard rushers, but Meadville has three. Colorfully-named halfback Journey Brown, a speedster who is drawing power-five-college attention, is chasing the District 10 rushing record and comes in with 2,230 yards and 39 touchdowns. Fullback Isaiah Manning is closing in on 2,000 yards, too; he’s got 1,764.

Antonio Ferraro joined them last game and now has 1,098 yards on the ground.

“They are very balanced in what they do,” DeLattre said. “They averaged 11 yards a carry for the three. They average 11 yards a carry for the season. They’ve scored more than 600 points, which, obviously, is a record for them. They do a lot of things with their wing-T. It takes a lot of discipline to stop it.”

In addition to feeling Meadville probably was going to be the team his Tigers met up with in the subregional final, DeLattre also thought it was time well-invested to practice against the wing-T because his players have seen very little of it, as opposed to the spread that Grove City runs. The only times the Tigers really have faced that offense in the last three years was against Mars and Fort Hill.

DeLattre hopes things turn out better than they did in the Fort Hill game, when the Sentinel back in September rolled up more than 500 rushing yards against the Tigers.

Meadville only has thrown the ball 45 times this season.

“It’s a commitment to a style of football,” Bulldogs coach Ray Collins said. “We just don’t play copycat and subscribe to all the spread offensive stuff that you see that everyone is doing. Our linemen have their hand in the dirt. We’ve got three fast, physical running backs. We have a physical offensive line.”

A player at DuBois in the mid-1980s, Collins is familiar with DeLattre — he was a Meadville assistant when the Bulldogs, still running the wing-T, played DeLattre’s Corry squads a few years ago.

The Bulldogs made news last year for score 107 points in a game against DuBois. They were expected to be very good this year, then promptly lost to Erie Central Tech and General McLane the first two weeks.

The closest game they’ve played since was a 22-point win over Conneaut two weeks ago.

“The second half of the General McLane game was kind of our moment of clarity as a football team,” Collins said. “We had really played six mediocre quarters of football. We got into the locker room, and enough was enough. If we wanted to have a good season, we had to start playing some football.”

It might get overshadowed by the Bulldogs’ numbers, but Hollidaysburg has been playing some pretty good offense lately, too. The Tigers have scored 33 points or more in four straight games. Quarterback Jarrett Cavalet has a three-game 100-yard rushing string, and Cory Storm has reached the century mark the last two weeks.

Cavalet’s also gone four games in a row completing 50 percent of his passes or better for at least 130 yards.

“I really like the way he plays football,” Collins said. “When I saw them on film, the first thing that jumps out at you is the size they have on the offensive and defensive side of the ball on the line.”

DeLattre needs that size to come into play on Friday.

“Providing a physical presence on both sides of the ball, gang-tackling, those kinds of things (will be crucial),” DeLattre said.

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