The Tenafly High School football team played Northern Valley Demarest on Friday, September 13 at Geissinger Field. This was a rivalry game, although a rivalry that NVD has owned for the past games they’ve had. Demarest has won four of the last five games against Tenafly, and won their first game against Bergen Tech by a whopping score of 40-0.
Demarest has a well built team this year. According to highschoolsports.nj.com, they have one of the best running backs in the entirety of the Ivy Red league, junior Reed Kauderer. Their offensive guard and defensive end, senior Marco De Croce, had committed to Fordham University just about two months before the two teams faced off. Led with junior quarterback Joseph Yun and coach Rob Petrella, NVD was a favorite to win this game. Even the people of Tenafly had a little doubt for their team.
Although Tenafly shouldn’t be taken lightly. Senior wide receivers David Hobaichan and Aidan Toboroff plus junior receiver and running back Troy Knause highlight the skill positions of the offense. Junior Jacob Kim and senior Dmitri Jefferson highlight both the offensive and defensive line. Junior Martin Jung is the face of the linebackers, and Hobaichan along with senior O’Shea Liles and Knause are the best of the secondary. Led by sophomore quarterback Alex Kramer, with a former NFL coach in Alonso Escalante and a strong supporting cast around him, Tenafly has also built a pretty strong team. These two teams fair off pretty well against each other.
But in a game that was supposed to be a good one to watch, a game between two strong rivals, NVD completely took over from the first drive. Demarest got a nice kick return that gave them the momentum to drive down the field and score a touchdown in just the first two minutes of the game. They never took their foot off the gas pedal, scoring another just six minutes later. Tenafly looked to be clawing back after recovering a muffed punt return, driving down the field and completing a 28 yard screen pass to freshman Adam Dafinoiu to get down to the 12 yard line. Dafinoiu soon after scored a seven yard touchdown with one minute 38 seconds left in the first quarter. Jefferson soon after ran in the two point conversion. Tenafly had the momentum at the moment. It looked like this was gonna be a good game, then by halftime the score was 27-8. The game completely flipped from the last two minutes of the first. NVD continued what they started for the rest of the game, and Tenafly’s offense was completely shut down until one of the final drives when senior Jaden Croce ran in a touchdown. NVD won by a final score of 41-14, with Kauderer scoring five touchdowns for Demarest.
“I think the team played better than the final score shows,” Alonso Escalante, or Coach Esco, said. “The thing that messed us up throughout the game was tackling. We had to be the best pursuit and tackling team, and this game we clearly weren’t.”
The team gave up a 47 yard and 59 yard touchdown, plus many other very big plays that didn’t result in touchdowns but set NVD up to end the drive with a score. The team leaders in missed tackles go from six, five, four, then three and lower. Even with Knause leading the team in tackles at six, with that many missed tackles, it’s hard to win any game. Especially when you can’t score more than 14 and your leading rusher has 12 yards while the opponent’s has 225.
This was a game to forget for both the fans of Tenafly football and the team itself. Although they showed some sparks during the game, they got dominated by the more consistent and the flat out better team that night.
Tenafly will have to bounce back next week after a game that some players had circled on their calendar didn’t go so well. Tenafly’s next game is away at Bergen County Technical School (Bergen Tech for short) on Thursday, September 19 at 6:00 pm. Hopefully, they will not start 0-3 and get a dominant win against one of the worse teams in the division.
