Fountain Valley was led by quarterback Isaac Combs (right) and receiver Drake Robinson in Thursday’s win. (PHOTOS: Tim Burt, OC Sports Zone).
Fountain Valley football players celebrate a milestone victory last week with a 20-14 win over Sonora whic was the program’s first league victory in eight seasons.
But the Barons may have enjoyed Thursday’s 45-21 Lambda League victory over Woodbridge at Huntington Beach even more.
“We’ve won two in a row, so we’re pretty happy about that,” said Fountain Valley Coach Mitch Olson.
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Woodbridge (2-5, 1-1) struck early when quarterback Waylon Stone hit a wide-open Ryan Dumont on an 82-yard touchdown pass on the game’s first play from scrimmage.
But Fountain Valley (4-3, 2-0) took a 10-point lead at halftime and dominated in the second half.
“We felt pretty good coming in, they’re a good team, defending CIF champions,” said Olson. “We just haven’t been clicking, we’ve been playing solid and hard, but making a lot of mistakes and in the first half we continued that.
“Then we went into halftime and guys got on each other and from that point on, we played pretty good football. This is foreign territory for them, Fountain Valley, we won a big game last week, so what do you do now? Second half was outstanding and that’s what we want to do the rest of the way.”
Junior quarterback Isaac Combs had an amazing game completing 23 of 28 passes for 341 yards and two touchowns and also had TD runs of 1 and 3 yards to lead the Barons offense. He started the game completing his first 11 passes.
His favorite target was receiver Drake Robinson who had 12 catches for 174 yards and a touchdown, an 11-yard reception in the first quarter that tied the score 7-7.
“It’s huge, we just want to keep the ball rolling,” Combs said. “We got three more games ahead of us and all we got to do is go 1-0 each game. This is a big victory, we put up a lot of points on the scoreboard. We’re happy with how we played. We just got to fix up some of the mistakes and keep going 1-0 {each week}.
“I got to give all the credit to the guys on the O-line, incredible job blocking and receivers made heckuva plays …. I’m so happy, but we know the job is not finished yet.”
“We had a plan going in, get the ball to our receivers, and we executed, we knew we were the better team up front and our skill players just had to go out and execute,” added Robinson. “It’s huge, we’ve had a great group of kids growing up since my freshmen year and we stuck together, we got a great group of seniors. O-line, receivers, quarterback, running back did great.”
Woodbridge was led by Stone, who completed 13 of 21 passes for 254 yards, 82 coming on the first play and three touchdown passes. Dumont had six catches for 144 yards and three touchdown catches.
But Fountain Valley held Woodbridge to only 48 yards rushing.
Woodbridge was also penalized 11 times, including several pass interference calls that helped Fountain Valley move the ball offensively and extended drives and some personal fouls.
Woodbridge Coach Connor McBride ackowledged the penalities hurt the Warriors.
“It’s a frustrating loss, it’s a team that we knew was going to be good and that we wanted to beat in league,” he said. “We faced a lot of adversity, injuries, our starting center, starting nose tackle, probably our most valuable guy went down. I really enjoyed to see the fight that my kids still had. We had a third string center come out and make plays, but at the end of the day, not enough plays were made.”
“Those PIs {pass interference calls} don’t always go your way, we can’t make excuses about it, there were certain plays that needed to be made and we didn’t.”
Fountain Valley running back Trenton Farr put the game out of reach when he scored on a 7-yard TD run early in the fourth quarter to put the Barons ahead 45-14. Farr also had a 14-yard TD run in the third quarter.
Stone connected with Dumont on a 4-yard TD pass for the Warrior final score with about five minutes remaining in the game.
Combs first TD put Fountain Valley ahead 14-7 late in the first quarter. Stone connected with Dumont on a 4-yard TD pass to even the score 14-14.
Omar Khaleq hit a 34-yard field goal midway through the second quarter to put Fountain Valley ahead 17-14. Then Coombs hit Raymond Dillon Jr. on a 25-yard TD pass with six seconds left in the second quarter to give the Barons a 10-point lead at the half.
—Tim Burt, OC Sports Zone; timburt@ocsportszone.com
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