By Ted Waddell
ELDRED — September 21, 2004 – Blame it on George Foreman.
While introducing the home team Yellowjacket varsity football squad prior to Sunday’s game versus Tri-Valley, Eldred Central School Athletic Director Al Wojtaszek had a temporary slip of the tongue when he introduced junior George Fountain as the famous boxer.
The matchup between Eldred and T-V had originally been scheduled for Saturday, but due to flooding associated with the remnants of Hurricane Ivan the contest was delayed until Sunday afternoon.
After falling behind 15-0 at the half, the Bears responded in the second half. T-V outscored the Yellowjackets by 24 points to defeat the home team by a final score of 30-21.
In the first half, the game was controlled by Eldred (1-2).
But in the third and fourth quarters, the Bears (1-1) bounced back in the wake of a spirited talking to by their coach’s father, a retired high school helmsman with three decades worth of experience coaching high school football teams.
Eldred began the scoring in the opening quarter as Patrick Kean ran 41 yards to paydirt.
In the second quarter, Yellowjacket running back Kyle Schneider made it a 15-0 game when he reached the end zone on an 8-yard run.
At halftime, Joseph Viglione, who served as coach of the Port Jervis varsity football team from 1957 to 1983 and coach of the Warwick varsity gridiron squad from 1987 to 1991, gave his son’s T-V players a few words of advice.
“He appealed to their sense of pride and talked about fighting back and overcoming adversity,” said T-V Coach Dave Viglione. “He told them they had to step up and play ball.”
And those words of fatherly advice worked.
In the opening minutes of the third quarter, Danny Knox put the Bears on the scoreboard with a three play drive culminating with his 19-yard scoring run.
However, the subsequent two-point conversion pass was knocked down by a fired up Eldred defense.
Later in the quarter, the Bears closed to within a point (15-14) on a 44-yard run by Danny Walter and two-point conversion by Knox.
In the fourth quarter, Eldred scored on a 5-yard pass from Nick McCormick to Schneider, but the PAT was stopped.
Then T-V scored a couple of unanswered TDs and conversions to walk away with the “W.”
Fullback Alan Coombe punched it across the goal line from a yard away and the quarterback Joe Garigliano took it across the goal line on the two-point conversion to give the Bears a 22-15 lead.
Knox closed out the game’s TD tally with a 44-yard run, followed up by a two-point conversion by Garigliano.
Knox had 22 carries for 152 yards, Coombe ran 11 times for 56 yards and Walter added 57 yards on three carries. Garigliano ran eight times for 35 yards and completed four of 14 passes for 80 yards.
“I thought we went flat in the second half and let their momentum and number 20 [Kevin Smith] take over the game,” said Frank Kean, the veteran coach of the Yellow Jackets.
Kean took some the weight of the loss on his shoulders by taking responsibility for the call not go for two after the Yellowjackets’ second touchdown, a factor that might - or might not - have changed the course of the game.
“We got bogged down in the first half… Eldred is a very physical team,” Dave Viglione said. “They were wearing on us pretty good.”
But after a few words of advice, the tide of the game turned from an impending defeat into a come from behind victory.
“At the half, we made a couple of adjustments,” Viglione said.