Tumwater’s fourth quarter comeback falls short, T-Birds upset by Sedro-Woolley

Alex Overbay squatted toward the end of the Tumwater team box, close to the 30-yard line at Sid Otton Field, and silently watched Sedro-Woolley take a knee on two plays to run the final 49 seconds off the clock.

Teammates joined the T-Birds senior quarterback, consoling each other as their season ended on Friday with a 30-22 loss to the Cubs in the Class 2A state Round of 16. Overbay and the offense had just put up 15 points in the final 7 minutes, 21 seconds of the game.

But Sedro-Woolley controlled a final, desperate onside-kick attempt with 51 seconds remaining. With no Tumwater time outs left, there was no way for last season’s state runners-up to get the ball back in the final seconds.

“Sedro-Woolley came out, they won the game in the first half,” Tumwater coach Bill Beattie said. “Scoring 30 points. They took it to us. Super proud the way our kids finished tonight. We made mistakes. I thought we did a good job of getting those things cleaned up in the second half.”

Tumwater (9-2) kept the Cubs (8-2) off the scoreboard in the second half. Sedro-Woolley still moved the football, though, running large chunks of time off the clock with a pair of long drives – one each in the third and fourth quarters.

Those drives limited the number of possessions, strengthening the position Sedro staked itself to with the big first half.

“I don’t even know how to explain it,” Cubs quarterback and defensive back Carsten Reynolds said. “But we came out ready to play.”

Offensively, Reynolds directed a Sedro-Woolley team that scored touchdowns on all four of its first-half possessions. Taking more than six minutes off the clock with a methodical, 11-play 62-yard drive to start the game, the Cubs set the tone.

“We like to get the ball first and see if we can get up early,” Sedro-Woolley coach Dave Ward said. “We like to establish a running game.”

Sedro-Woolley did that, rushing for 224 yards of its 305 total yards. Reynolds accounted for 191 of those total offensive yards, rushing for 110 and the final touchdown of the first half on 11 carries, and adding 81 passing yards (five of 12).

The Reynolds rushing touchdown was the dagger play for the Cubs. His acrobatic 35-yard romp, on which he spun out of one tackle, turned sideways to slip through two other would-be tacklers and then tip-toed along the left sideline the final eight yards to get into the end zone came with 19 seconds left in the second quarter.

And it came less than two minutes after Austin Crossen had extended the Sedro-Woolley lead to 22-7 with a 7-yard run of his own at 1:45 of the second quarter. Tumwater, trying to get back in the game, took the ball over on the kickoff but failed to get a first down and took just 41 seconds off the clock.

That left 59 seconds in the half (five seconds came off the clock on the kickoff). With the aid of an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty on the T-Bird on a second-and-20 from the 50, the Cubs used just three plays to add on to the lead.

“Unfortunately at this point of the season, you win you move on, you don’t you go home,” Beattie said. “It’s a sad way to end the season, but I’m super proud of the way the kids played all year. We’re very young, only had a couple of returning starters, and they battled all year.”

Faced with the big deficit, the T-Birds still mounted a comeback attempt.

With 7:21 to go, Charles Crawford capped a drive with a 7-yard run to get within two possessions, 30-14. Sedro-Woolley then ran more than five minutes of the remaining time off the clock before missing on a fourth-down at the Tumwater 20.

Overbay, along with a two-point run from Carlos Matheney with 51 seconds left, closed the gap to 30-22. That set up the final onside opportunity.

“Just unfortunately we didn’t have enough time in the second half,” Beattie said. “The way our kids finished, they finished with a lot of class and hard work.”