Lethbridge defeats Badger football team
BONNERS FERRY — The perennial international matchup between the Badgers and the Lethbridge Rams from Alberta, Canada, was played last Friday night in Bonners Ferry.
Since 1999 these two teams have met on the gridiron 13 times before Friday and the game is often a thriller.
Five games have come down to the final play and Bonners Ferry has gone 6-6-1 against the Rams.
The excitement that Badger fans have enjoyed in past years was nowhere to be seen, though, on the 14th matchup between the two rivals as Lethbridge walked away with a 40-7 victory.
The first series of the game ended in three plays.
The third play was a touchdown pass from Colton Gibb to Brock Ramias to give Lethbridge the early 7-0 lead.
After the first series, though, the Bonners Ferry defense settled in and forced a run of punts as well as an interception each from Zach Wilson and Brendan Evans.
The Badger offense would never settle in, however.
Less than five minutes after the opening drive that ended in a Lethbridge touchdown, Christian Trocke threw a screen pass that was well read by Jeff Pierson who picked it off and returned it for another touchdown.
The home team’s defense did their best to keep the Badgers in the game. They forced a fumble deep in Lethbridge territory.
The ball was kicked around in a sea of blue and green as both teams tried gain possession. Just as the ball crossed into the end zone, Kyler Rice pounced on it to give Bonners Ferry the touchdown. It would be Bonners Ferry’s only touchdown.
“I like what our defense did,” said McLaughlin. “We kept the team in the game defensively.”
The score easily could have been 7-13 going into the half thanks to the defensive effort if it was not for two bad breaks for the Badgers. The first was a big play at the beginning of the second quarter that sent Gibb scrambling almost 60 yards to the end zone.
“These guys battled. What I didn’t like is that we had breakdown on some big plays,” McLaughlin said.
The second bad break was a fumble in the Badger backfield that Lethbridge’s Brandon Karl scooped up and returned 35 yards for a touchdown that sent the game into halftime with a 26-7 Lethbridge lead.
That play was especially hard to swallow because it came right after Bonners Ferry intercepted one of Gibb’s passes and it happened only seconds before half time, but that was pretty much how things went for the Bonners offense.
“Offensively we were terrible,” said Coach McLaughlin.
He cited troubles snapping the ball and a lack of a consistent run game as part of the problem, but was justifiably optimistic that the young Badger team would improve especially considering that this was only the second game of the season.
The second half did not get much better. Gibb is impressively mobile and kept plays and drives alive on his athleticism alone.
On a fourth and 12 situation he scrambled for 28 yards that set up to another Brock Ramias touchdown on the next play, and Gibb had another 60 yard sprint for a touchdown that set the score at 40-7. “That number 10 was a heck of an athlete,” said McLaughlin referring to Gibb, “our kids played a little tentative around him because they knew how fast he was.”
It was a tough loss to swallow but one the Badgers will learn from. They have two more chances to improve before league play opens on September 21, against Orofino. The first chance comes this Friday when the Badgers travel to Washington to take on the Cardinals of Medical Lake.
(Information for this article was found on boundarycountylive.com)