Quantcast
skip navigation

Stillwater wins wild one

By Jim Paulsen, Star Tribune, 09/02/11, 11:23AM CDT

Share

The Ponies gave new coach Beau LaBore a debut victory over his old Woodbury squad

It wasn’t so much what happened in Stillwater’s 27-20 victory over Woodbury. It was more a matter of what didn’t happen.

The first game of the season featured back-to-back onside kicks by the same team, coaches taking chances deep in their own end of the field, long passes, big runs, a quarterback-by-committee approach by Woodbury and, to top it all off, a complete power outage at Stillwater’s Pony Stadium with 1:50 left in the game and the host team driving and trying to put the game away.

For sheer entertainment value, the game was a bargain.

As it turned out, for all of the bold decisions and slap-your-head moments, conventional football turned the tide.

Woodbury turned the ball over four times while Stillwater didn’t give it up once despite fumbling three times.

And when momentum was still swinging wildly from side to side after a breathless 28-point first quarter — Woodbury scored 14 points in less than a minute and tried back-to-back onside kicks — Stillwater succeeded with straight-ahead football, getting its last two touchdowns as a result of long, ball-controlling drives.

“I’ll be the first to say that we’ve all got some things to work on,” said new Stillwater coach Beau LaBore, who took over after six years with Woodbury.

He included himself in that comment after a decision to go for it on fourth-and-2 at Stillwater’s 34-yard line eventually resulted in a Woodbury touchdown.

“We made mistakes. I made a coaching mistake,” he said. “Those are all things we’ll work on correcting.”

The difference-maker for Stillwater was Nate Ricci. A fleet, athletic junior making his first varsity start at quarterback, Ricci ran for the Ponies’ first two touchdowns and passed for their last two, the final one a perfect 20-yard strike to Josh Weess to give the Ponies a 27-20 lead.

“He’s battle-tested and he’s very coachable,” LaBore said.

For Hill, the first-year Woodbury coach who graduated from the high school 15 years ago, it was a bittersweet return.

“We killed ourselves with mistakes,” he said. "You can't win if you lose the turnover battle 4-0. If we cut down on the mistakes and play fundamental football, we win that game."
 

LaBore glad to put Woodbury game behind him

Beau LaBore has a reputation for being candid. And so, while he hesitated to talk about his move from Woodbury, where he had coached for six previous seasons, to rival Stillwater, he stayed true to form, opening up about the move that had been the overriding storyline before Friday’s game.

“Very honestly,” LaBore said, “for the first five-and-a-half months, I didn’t think much about it. Then, over the last few weeks, I started to think about it more. Over the last two days, I’ve thought about it even more.”

That LaBore admitted to being human is refreshing in a day and age when coaches are loathe to admit anything that may be perceived as weakness. He did say, however, that his mixed feelings about coaching against his old team were his and his alone. Coaching a football team is difficult enough. Why burden them with his own issues?

“I internalized it all,” LaBore said. “We had to stay focused on the job to do here. We didn’t need to have anything else to deal with.”

The power outage that hit Stillwater’s Pony Stadium with 1:50 left in the game affected LaBore perhaps more than he anticipated.

“I was so glad that this game was going to be behind me,” he said. “During the [power outage], I started thinking ‘What if we have to suspend the game? I’ve been dealing with this for a couple of weeks. I don’t know if I want to do it for 24 more hours.”

For his part, Woodbury coach Andy Hill said that LaBore’s departure had little direct effect on him or his team, save for one very concrete effect.

“We addressed it once, but then we didn’t think about it much,” said Hill, a 1996 graduate of Woodbury who left a head coaching job at South Lakes High School in Reston, Va., to take the job at his alma mater. “He’s a great coach, but he doesn’t play. We were concerned with the players who play.”

“But in a way I’m glad about how it worked out. He got the job [at Stillwater]. And I got to come back here and coach the team I’ve always wanted to coach.”
 

Related Stories