JV Spears record first victory
Jacob Iannizzi threw four touchdown passes to power the Niagara Spears junior varsity (under-16) football team to a 30-4 victory over visiting Oakville in Ontario Summer Football League action.
“We won. It was pretty awesome,” said Spears head coach Brad Martin, commenting on the team’s first victory of the season.
Liam Finley caught TD passes of 80 and 20 yards and Brody Payne has TD grabs of 40 and 12 yards. Niagara’s other points came on a safety.
“It was a good win and the kids played well. We still need to clean up some things with penalties and stuff but for their confidence and the abilities they have it was a good win,” he said.
A lot of things went right in the victory.
“We executed and we had less errors. We were able to put drives together, we had good stops on defence and we didn’t let them score,” he said. “We took two safeties because of a bad snap and a punt where our punter kicked the ball off our own guy who didn’t step up. They got the ball twice inside our 20 and we only gave up four points.”
Martin is hoping the win is the start to a strong finish to the season.
“We have Scarborough Saturday and the kids had a good practice tonight (Tuesday). They look more confident and they realize what they can do if they put some plays together and eliminate the mental errors.”
Game time Saturday in Scarborough is 4 p.m. at Birchmount Stadium
DURHAM 35 BANTAM SPEARS 20
The visiting Niagara Spears bantam (under-14) football team fell behind by 14 points early and couldn’t recover last Saturday in a 35-20 loss to Durham.
“Unfortunately, we were unable to overcome the early mistakes that lead to the 14-point lead in the first quarter, but I was pleased with how we played in the other three quarters,” Niagara head coach Troy Herbert said. “We will continue to work hard at practice on our bye week this week and next week as we prepare to play Burlington on July 13.”
Niagara scored its first touchdown on a three-yard fumble recovery run by Tristan Herbert followed by a convert from Noah Roller.
Asar McIntyre Christie then added another touchdown and Roller added the convert. Spencer McRae closed out the scoring with a touchdown followed by a failed two-point convert.
Loxdyn Raducanu and Angelo Chukwu had strong games on offence for the Spears and Spencer McRae had another strong outing for Niagara.
