Yakima Herald

Mustangs rally past Bulldogs

ELLENSBURG, Wash. — A famous football coach once described his winning strategy as “going with the horse that brung you.”

Well, as horses go, Isaac Anderson — generously listed as 5-foot-8 and 175 pounds — may look like a mere pony, but the Prosser junior running back is pure plowhorse. And when the Mustangs found themselves trailing Ellensburg in Friday night’s showdown of the CWAC’s top two teams, they simply climbed on Anderson’s back and rode him to a 23-20 victory.

Prosser’s winning points came on freshman Trino Flores’ 25-yard field goal as time expired, just 31?2 minutes after quarterback T.J. Finn had tied the game with a 1-yard plunge. But almost everything — repeat, almost everything; more on that in a moment — leading up to those scores was pure Anderson, who carried the ball an exhaustive 40 times for 213 yards and a touchdown.

“I wouldn’t stop,” said Anderson, whose six consecutive carries on that game-winning drive earned 61 yards to the 8-yard-line, where Flores’ money kick finished it off. “Right now I don’t feel a thing, I’m so pumped. I didn’t want to stop running. They couldn’t stop me, so I wanted to keep going.”

“He has great field sense,” Ellensburg coach Randy Affholter said of Anderson. “He sees things — he sees cuts, he sees holes. He does a good job packing the ball.”

But if Anderson was the player of the game, the play of the game belonged to Finn and wide receiver Dominic Garza. The Mustangs (4-0 CWAC, 4-1 overall) trailed 20-13 after quarterback Adam Haberman’s second touchdown run of the game, and with 5:12 remaining Prosser faced a fourth-and-9 at the Bulldog 25.

Prosser coach Benji Sonnichsen wanted to call a pass play to Garza the Mustangs call “94 smash,” in which he has the option of cutting to the corner or running a post. But he was hesitant because he was afraid Garza would be double-covered. Garza didn’t care.

“He told me, ‘No, coach, just let me line up and I’ll make the play,’” Sonnichsen said with a smile. Garza faked the out and then cut left on the post route, with only one defender there. “He was coming across the middle on a skinny posts, and the safety turned his head, I threw it to the open and he made a great catch,” Finn said. “Great play.”

“I got the single coverage, just the safety covering. And that pass, it was a bullet,” Garza said. “T.J. does that in practice. I had to cradle it underhand.” He made the grab at the 2-yard-line, and three plays later Finn dove in for the tying touchdown.

Ellensburg (3-1, 3-2) seemingly had the game in hand prior to Prosser’s late heroics, having tied the game on a second-quarter Haberman-to-Damien Roseberry 39-yard scoring pass and then gone ahead on an 80-yard second-half drive in which receiver Kramer Ferrell caught accounted for 73 of the 80 yards on four receptions. But in the end, Prosser had the horse. Not a big horse. But he brought home a big win.

Freshman boots way into lore of Prosser

ELLENSBURG, Wash. — “Dude,” the young Prosser fan screamed, “they can’t do that. They absolutely can’t do that.

“Can they?”

When told that yes, Ellensburg could in fact call back-to-back time outs in an attempt to ice the Mustangs kicker, he resumed hopping up and down with some friends, stationed well behind Andreotti Field’s south goal post in antici-pation of Friday night’s impending, game-deciding play.

Five seconds were left.

“He’ll make it anyway,” one of them said. “Yeah,” another chimed in. “Even if he is a freshman.”

“Seriously?” I asked.

“Yep,” the fan said.

“So will he make it?” I asked.

“Oh yeah,” he said. “No worries. He’ll do it.”

After which Trino Flores, a ninth grader, kicked his way into Prosser’s voluminous football lore. Flores’ 25-yard field goal was well within his left upright and soared far beyond the crossbar, sending the Mustangs into riotous celebration of a 23-20 victory.

After a quick trip to the sidelines to salute their fans, the Mustangs gathered at midfield and hoisted their hero high into the air, his right index finger pointing toward the sky. Lifting shouldn’t have been a problem for the gang of players who did it, given that Flores is listed at 5-foot-10 and 145 pounds.

“My teammates were responsible for this,” he said shortly afterward, struggling to express his emotions. “The offense brought the ball right down the field and the line protected me great on the kick.” Asked his range, Flores said, “I’m not really sure. This was my first field goal.”

And one neither he nor any Prosser player or fan who witnessed it will soon forget. For that matter, everyone present should feel privileged to have seen one of the greatest games ever played at Andreotti, which has seen many.

That the Mustangs converted no fewer than three fourth downs on their first scoring drive proved indicative of things to come. What to this point seem clearly the cream of the CWAC crop then waged a classic ebb-and-flow, back-and-forth tussle.

Coach Randy Affholter’s Bulldogs countered with just enough discretion regarding playmaker extraordinaire Kramer Ferrell that the multitalented senior made a bundle of them. Back came Prosser, riding tireless junior running back Isaac Anderson.

On the Mustangs’ final possession, with time running out, the game on the line and Ellensburg’s defense knowing well what was coming, Anderson carried six times for 61 yards. With a lot of help from his friends.

“It was awesome,” said a still-breathless Kyle Bailey, a 220-pound senior lineman. “They knew what we were going to do and they couldn’t stop it. We’d come to the line and say, ‘Here we come, here we come,’ and they could not stop us.”

Coach Benji Sonnichsen, quietly savoring the moment, said, “At Prosser, the expectations reached a point where we felt we had to beat everybody by 50. But before the game tonight, I told the kids it doesn’t matter what the score or the margin is, just win the game. Find a way, and it doesn’t matter. “And I think that frees people up to play a little bit. They’re not quite as worried about making mistakes.”

Flores made one, missing the extra point after the Mustangs’ second touchdown. But when it counted — with the game on the line and fans from both sides standing in anticipation — he came through.

“He was somethin’ huh?” asked Bailey, who’d no doubt have been well versed in pass blocking had Tom Moore still been his head coach. “We’re a running team now, but it doesn’t matter. Not as long as we get the W.” Even with a freshman making sure they got it.