Legendary Hermantown football coach Mike Zagelmeyer on the Hawks’ heartbreaking, 48-44 road loss at North Branch on Friday night – “This was one of those games where you need to write a book about because there is just too much material for a news article. I am going to have a tough time even trying to unpack everything that happened. We have won many great games in the past at Hermantown, but we have also lost our share of those great games. This one has to rate close to the top, if not at the top, as one of the toughest regular season losses I can remember in my 28-year tenure here.
We started out really slow—again, something we need to correct going forward—but the guys battled back. We got some momentum heading into halftime and were only down by a touchdown. Then Landon Burg housed the opening second-half kickoff, and I thought we were the ones who seemed to be taking it to North Branch in the second half. Our defense was much better in the second half, but we dug ourselves a hole by the way we played in the first quarter.
We gave up 400 yards on the ground to North Branch, and almost 100 in the air, and that is not the recipe for winning a football game. We have to be better defensively. However, I think our defense learned some valuable lessons playing North Branch that hopefully can be carried forward if we get the chance to play them again in the playoffs.
Offensively, Alex Schott played one of his best games as a Hawk as he was 13-16 for 183 with two TDs. Landon Burg (7 rec, 89 yds) came up with a couple of huge catches to keep drives alive and Kale Smith (2 rec, 29 yds, 2 TDs) caught a TD that would rival most highlight reel catches you see on Sundays by keeping his toes inbounds in the endzone.
It was the type of game where it felt like whoever had the ball last was going to win the game. Unfortunately, that was North Branch, as they scored with three seconds left on a 19-yard touchdown pass – a pass where we coulda, woulda, shoulda sacked the quarterback and then misplayed the receiver in the endzone. Just a tough play to swallow.
With all this being said, it is just a regular-season loss. I think it is a loss that will build a ton of character in our team and while it sounds cliché, I believe this game is something we can learn from. As I told the team after the game, our coaching staff is tremendously excited to see how we react to this game, how we handle this disappointment, and then how we battle back from it. We are on the road again to Grand Rapids this week, so it’s obviously a big game for us in a tough environment. So the challenge is for our guys to bounce back and treat this week, Week 4, like it is its own season.”