A Little Extra: Hersey-Maine South Football an Entertaining Show
Jenkins, Gumino Deliver for Huskies; Purcell Makes Late Impression for Hawks; Retired Athletic Trainers on the Spot; Intentional Walk Recalls Arlington's Fritz Peterson
The term “throw out the record books when these two teams meet” typically is used in a slightly derogatory fashion for a game where the opponents are not very good.
But you can throw out the 1-2 records after Hersey beat Maine South 28-23 on Friday night in their Central Suburban League/Mid-Suburban League crossover. The quality of play, intensity and drama before a big crowd at Roland Goins Stadium in Arlington Heights was of a much higher caliber than two teams sitting below .500 after the first third of the regular season. Some of the postgame emotions and reactions of players on both sides resembled a playoff or conference championship game and not one in Week 3.
There was a whole lot to unpack from a wild night, and one of the biggest regular-season wins in Hersey history, and there wasn’t nearly enough space for in my Daily Herald game story. So here we go:
Hersey’s Jenkins Breaks Out and Breaks Away
Hersey junior running back Brandon Jenkins showed some glimpses of what he was capable of in the first two games with 49 yards and a touchdown at Warren and a 65-yard touchdown run at Barrington.
He showed what he was fully capable of Friday with one of the best rushing performances in school history with 238 yards on 33 carries and 2 touchdowns.
“He’s a phenomenal football player and a very talented kid,” said Hersey coach Tom Nelson of his two-way player who also had the clinching interception at cornerback with 1:46 to play.
“It’s huge,” UCLA-bound quarterback Colton Gumino said of having Jenkins as an offensive weapon. “More teams game-plan us as a throwing team, and we have a great receiving corps, so that’s probably what Maine South was game-planning for. We adjusted by running the ball and Brandon Jenkins played his heart out.”
Jenkins had 8 runs between 11 and 40 yards behind his line of Sal Marabotti, Jackson Organ, DJ Maloney, Jack Nolan and Thomas Mulder. His 19-yard touchdown run, followed by a stop deep in its own territory, appeared to put Hersey in control up 28-14 with 8:23 left.
But when Jenkins was thrown for a 4-yard loss in his own end zone and Maine South came right back with a touchdown off the free kick the lead was suddenly just 5 points with 6:44 still to play.
“I was infuriated a little bit but the team picked me back up,” Jenkins said. “I got the pick and we ended the game on offense. My teammates always have my back.
“We knew this game was a big game and we knew we had to win this to show who we were.”
Brendon Reilly ran for a school-record 278 yards in a 1998 season-opening win over St. Viator and future NFL running back Jarrett Payton. Star dual-threat quarterback Jordan Hansen, who is playing at Northern Illinois, nearly eclipsed it in 2019 with 274 yards against Glenbrook North. Hansen also had games of 253 yards vs. Rolling Meadows and 237 vs. Prospect.
And in the program’s first full season in 1969, Skip Peterson rushed for 263 yards in a loss to Palatine for a record that stood until it was broken by Reilly.
Better Execution Equals Better Results
Seven turnovers and a minus-6 ratio was a big negative for Hersey in its first two games.
But the Huskies finished plus-3 against Maine South and all of them were pivotal. After Hersey tied the game at 7-7 on Jenkins’ 4-yard touchdown run, Luke Koclanis recovered a fumble on the kickoff at the Hawks’ 35 and four plays later Gumino hit Logan Clark for a 15-yard touchdown and a lead it never lost.
Nick Alquist’s forced fumble and Connor Moga’s recovery ended a Maine South chance to get within a touchdown with 7:23 left and Jenkins’ interception ended the Hawks’ last chance.
“We started off 0-2 because we didn’t execute,” Gumino said. “We were falling short and getting killed by these good teams.”
Hersey’s execution never looked better than it did when it took a 21-7 lead on a flea flicker with Jenkins and Tyler Wentink ultimately getting the ball back to Gumino for a perfectly placed bomb of 57-yards to Clark. It was all part of what Nelson described as being on the “tough side of the mountain” of the schedule that includes a trip to Glenbrook South next week before starting its drive for a third consecutive MSL East title.
Hersey did come up empty on two drives inside the Maine South 20 and another to its 30. And the finish got a bit tense but Nelson said no one is perfect in a high-school football game.
“Honestly it feels good to be in a competitive football game where every possession, every play and every decision matters,” he said. “That’s fun for me. It’s football at the highest level.”
Doesn’t Get Easier for Hawks
Maine South has faced one of the most challenging schedules around with trips to Lincoln-Way East and Hersey sandwiched around a home game with Warren. Now it returns home to Park Ridge for a visit next Friday from unbeaten Barrington.
“We’re not a bad ballclub,” said Maine South coach Dave Inserra. “We’ve played three really good teams and the fourth one is even better. I said if we were 2-2 we’re a championship-type team. But the toughest one is next week.”
The game couldn’t have started any better as Constantine Coines hit Mason Petras with a perfect deep ball for 72 yards on the first play. But the next five possessions saw the Hawks gain only 92 yards and after Hersey took a 28-14 lead, Inserra turned over the offense to sophomore Jameson Purcell as the third quarter was coming to an end.
The 6-foot-2, 185-pound lefty, who has scholarship offers from schools such as Ole Miss, Nebraska, Washington and Miami (Florida), according to recruiting expert Tim “Edgy Tim” O’Halloran, was 10-for-12 for 113 yards with a touchdown and interception. Purcell moved the ball from the Maine South 36 to the Hersey 1 on his first possession but a long scramble and potential touchdown to Michael Dellumo was wiped out by a 15-yard penalty because Dellumo had gone out of bounds before coming back into the end zone.
But after a safety and free kick, Purcell hit all 4 of his passes for 48 yards, capped by an 8-yard touchdown to Joey Naughton.
“He gave us a chance and he did what he was supposed to do,” Inserra said. “We’ll have to make a decision.”
Maine South did allow only 38 of 440 total yards in the final 12 minutes and Inserra said “defensively we finally figured some things out but we’ve got to figure it out in the first quarter or early second quarter. We have to tackle better on defense and take care of the ball.”
Barrington and standout quarterback Nick Peipert won last year’s Class 8A quarterfinal meeting 42-40 in their fifth high-profile postseason matchup with Maine South in the last 18 years. The Broncos won second-round games 42-34 in 2006 and 21-7 in 2014 and Maine South won 42-0 in the 2008 quarterfinals and 42-27 in the 2016 second round.
Long-Awaited Rematch for Hersey and Maine South
According to my records, Hersey and Maine South had not played each other since Week 2 of 1984. They first played in 1971 and opened the season from 1979-83 when then Hersey head coach Joe Gliwa put a hiatus on crosstown rivalry with St. Viator.
Gliwa was Viator’s head coach from 1964-70 before moving over to Hersey from 1971-81.
“Personally it’s just been too much of an emotional strain to play Viator every year,” Gliwa told the Daily Herald’s Keith Reinhard of the opening switch to Maine South. “The rivalry has been a great one but you can’t imagine the buildup every season around my house. I can do without that.”
Hersey is now 6-2 against Maine South and won the first four matchups by shutouts. Similar to Friday night, where Hersey unveiled a flea flicker touchdown pass, Hersey won the 1981 meeting 6-0 on a “Palatine Special” where quarterback Dave Koziol lateraled to Jim Limperis, who rolled right and threw a 49-yard pass to tight end Jim Mueller for the only points. The name of the play came because Hersey used it against Palatine the previous season.
The 1982 game was the head coaching debut of Bruce Glover, who would lead the school to a Class 6A title five years later. Maine South won that matchup 20-7 and the 1984 meeting 12-7.
Hersey-Maine South football history
2024 - Hersey 28-23
1984 - Maine South 12-7
1983 - Hersey 18-7
1982 - Maine South 20-7
1981 - Hersey 6-0
1980 - Hersey 21-0
1979 - Hersey 26-0
1971 - Hersey 7-0
No Shortage of Sideline Athletic Training Expertise
The prolonged warm weather and humidity into mid-September continues to take a toll with players dealing with muscle cramps. In one instance a play to the Hersey sideline saw a Maine South player on the ground with the agonizing pain they cause.
Right in front of retired Hall of Fame athletic trainers Matt Guth from Prospect and Hal Hilmer from Hersey, who had come over to watch the game. Hersey head athletic trainer Ric Bacon and his staff and the Maine South athletic trainer quickly turned it into a mini-convention of sorts for athletic trainers.
“There’s 100-plus years of experience here,” Guth joked.
Guth was inducted into the Illinois Athletic Trainers Association Hall of Fame in 1995 and Hilmer joined him two years later.
Schaumburg Grad Torresso Helps CSL in MSL Crossovers
The Mid-Suburban League finished 9-3 in the first of two rounds of matchups with the Central Suburban League. Hersey-Maine South was the closest margin at 5 points with three others ending in one-possession margins - Palatine over Evanston 25-19, Rolling Meadows over Glenbrook North 42-34 and Maine West over Conant 27-19.
The widest margins were 58 points (Fremd 65, Highland Park 7, 57 (Hoffman Estates 57, Maine East 0) and 43 (Prospect 43, New Trier 0). The other shutout was Niles West, coached by Schaumburg grad Nick Torresso, beating Elk Grove 20-0.
Torresso brings his 2-1 Niles West team back to his old stomping grounds Friday for the CSL-MSL crossover against the unbeaten Saxons at Gary Scholz Stadium, where he was a Daily Herald All-Area two-way lineman in 2006 for current head coach Mark Stilling. Schaumburg won their matchup 17-7 in 2022.
Torresso is 13-18 in his fourth year as Niles West’s head coach and last year’s 6-4 team was the first winning season and playoff berth for the program since 2014. The Wolves were 2-31 in the four seasons before Torresso took over in the fall of 2021.
Yankees Game Goes on the Fritz
A hot-button intentional walk by New York Yankees pitcher Gerrit Cole on Saturday unintentionally brought Arlington grad Fritz Peterson out of the team’s record books and into the news.
Cole’s fourth-inning intentional walk of Boston’s Rafael Devers with no one on base was the earliest that had occurred in a game by a Yankees pitcher since 1970 when Peterson put the Washington Senators’ Frank Howard on with no one on base in the sixth inning, according to mlb.com reporter Bryan Hoch.
Cole’s move backfired as a 1-0 lead turned into a 7-1 loss. Ironically, the two-out intentional pass of Howard, one of the most feared sluggers in baseball history, on April 22, 1970 came back to bite Peterson as he scored the first run of the game on a single by Hank Allen, the brother of MLB star Dick Allen, according to Baseball Reference. The Yankees lost the game 2-1 in 18 innings.
It turned out to be an All-Star season for both players. Peterson went 20-11 with a 2.90 ERA. The 6-foot-7, 255-pound Howard, nicknamed “The Capital Punisher,” led the American League with 44 homers, 126 RBI, 132 walks and 29 intentional passes.
Also ironic is Peterson, a member of the Northern Illinois University Hall of Fame who passed away last October, still ranks as one of the top control pitchers in Major League Baseball history. The left-hander’s 1.728 walks per 9 innings from 1966-76 with the Yankees, Cleveland and Texas ranks 45th all-time for pitchers with at least 1,000 career innings pitched and is 21st in modern baseball history (since 1901).
Millstone Steps Up with NCAA Women’s Hoop Champions
Sam Millstone, a Daily Herald All-Area point guard when Palatine won its first league title in 30 years in 2023, will be a manager for defending NCAA women’s basketball champion South Carolina. Millstone, a sophomore, was part of the “Highlighters” practice squad last season for head coach Dawn Staley.
We profiled Millstone and BG grad Sloan Kipley, who was at Iowa, in the Daily Herald last winter for their roles on the men’s practice squads that helped their women’s teams reach the NCAA championship game.