Olympia stays the course to overcome River Ridge’s speed in season-ending win
River Ridge High School has an overdose of the quality every team in every sport craves — speed.
During the first seven minutes Friday night at South Sound Stadium in Lacey, it appeared the Hawks had too much quickness for visiting Olympia to handle.
On the second play of the game, Dickinson State-bound senior running back Darion Brown burst up the middle for 70 yards with the entire Bears defense well beaten.
Exactly five minutes later, with five minutes, 19 seconds to play in the quarter, Georgetown-bound quarterback Dontae Owens bobbled the snap, then sprinted 41 yards to the end zone.
But with Olympia, in coach Nick Mullen’s words, “staying the course” and sticking to its game plan, the Bears used their own potent passing game and a scoring oddity — two safeties in one game — to finish this COVID-19 pandemic-abbreviated season with a 17-13 victory over River Ridge.
The game, originally planned as a season-opening scrimmage, but delayed by a February snowstorm, was a Class 3A South Sound Conference contest pitting two teams that played in other classifications during the 2019 season.
Ridge was a 2A school yet to grow to 3A size. Olympia was a member of a 4A league based in another region of Washington’s pandemic recovery plan.
The contest, played at times under sheets of near-freezing rain, was tense throughout, with neither team ever taking more than a touchdown’s lead.
After Brown’s long touchdown run put the Hawks up 7-0, Olympia countered with a quick, 54-yard, four-play drive to tie it on a 16-yard scoring pass from Gabe Downing to Alfredo Ramirez-Cortes.
Olympia briefly took a 9-7 lead when it forced the first of its two safeties, but Owens’ run put the Hawks back up, 13-9 — a lead they held well into the third quarter.
Taking over after a River Ridge punt died at the Olympia 24, the Bears marched 76 yards on 10 plays to take the lead for good, 15-13, on a 3-yard pass from Downing to Mason Juergens with 7:29 to go in the period.
Neither team reached the end zone again, though Olympia again forced a safety on the first play of the fourth quarter to finalize the score at 17-13.
River Ridge’s last best chance to reverse the outcome came when it took over at its own 47 after an Olympia punt with 3:06 to play. But the Hawks fumbled the ball away on the first play and though they later got it back one final time, the advantageous field position was gone and they wound up turning their last possession over on downs to the Bears.
With a 4-1 record in the spring season, Mullen says he learned something basic and positive about his team.
“We’ve got a pretty good football team to take back into the (4A) SPSL in the fall,” he said.
This story was originally published March 20, 2021 at 12:36 AM.