BERWICK — Ciro Cinti was ready to kick the extra point after Wilkes-Barre took a seven-point lead on Berwick in the second quarter Friday night at Crispin Field. It seemed to be the most logical decision for the Wolfpack.
But veteran defensive coordinator Ed Michaels got in Cinti’s ear quickly and talked about going for two points. With Berwick suffering a bad PAT snap on its first touchdown of the night and not getting off a kick, Michaels posited going for two was a win-win situation. Miss it and the Wolfpack were still up seven. Get it, and Berwick would be in chase mode down two scores.
Cinti, the 20-plus year head coach, rolled the dice. Quarterback Declan Gregor found a wide open Wonder Woods in the end zone, and Woods picked the ball clean off his shoelaces for the two-pointer. Berwick never caught up.
In one of the weirdest high school football games in recent memory, Wilkes-Barre avoided the first 0-4 start in program history with a 22-12 win over the Bulldogs. Even Cinti as the winning coach was left scratching his head afterward, and his team wasn’t the one on the short end of a pair of decisions by the officiating which twice changed the complexion of Friday’s game.
But what Cinti’s team did do is finally notch a tally in the win column for the first time in four weeks. The 1-3 start matches the worst record through four games since the Wilkes-Barre school district merged to one program in 2019.
“Yeah,” Cinti said as he removed his had and scratched his head. “That was one for the records, I guess. All we wanted to do was stop the bleeding and get a win and then we can worry about the rest of the season. Was it pretty? Maybe not. But we stopped the bleeding.”
The way Wilkes-Barre stopped the bleeding wasn’t fancy. They handed the football to six different ball-carriers and picked on the perimeter in the run game. Cinti didn’t have visions of grandeur, expecting to break long runs and touchdowns. But he did think the running-back-by-committee approach to keep the sticks moving. And that’s exactly what happened.
Kymani Hubbard-Jones took the bulk of that duty, carrying 15 times for 74 yards and a touchdown. As a team, the Wolfpack averaged just over 3 yards a carry Friday night. But the running game was good enough to put the team in manageable third-down situations.
On its first touchdown drive, the Wolfpack converted a trio of third downs leading to a Declan Gregor 1-yard quarterback sneak which gave Wilkes-Barre a 7-6 lead. That drive lasted 15 plays and took 6 minutes, 1 second off the game clock.
Wilkes-Barre used eight plays on its second scoring drive to cover just 29 yards, but converted on a third-and-3 and a fourth-and-3 — both with a Hubbard-Jones carry — before Noah Monsour scored from 4 yards out. Wilkes-Barre picked on the perimeter of Berwick’s defense because the Bulldogs were without all-conference defensive end Gabe Decker, who was out with an injury.
“The bottom line is we were going to run either way,” Cinti said. “But with him not out there, absolutely we’re going to. You have to exploit whatever you can. It’s high school football. We don’t really have a true running back, but all the kids really contributed, and that’s probably the best the line has blocked all year.”
“We were just not able to tackle on defense,” Berwick coach CJ Curry said. “I can’t tell you how many run-throughs that we had, I just know that we couldn’t bring the back down in the backfield.”
It was after that Monsour touchdown when Cinti decided to take Michaels’ advice and go for two. The nine-point lead forced Berwick to really chase. Trailing 15-6, Berwick tried to work its way downfield to end the second quarter and give kicker Caleb Yost a look at the uprights.
The Bulldogs rattled off three consecutive first downs to get to the Wilkes-Barre 40. They picked up another first down and spiked the football with 10 seconds to go at the 30. After a fade down the sideline fell incomplete with 6 seconds left, Curry called on quarterback Brady Cleaver (15 carries, 193 yards, 2 touchdowns) to run a quarterback sneak to pick up a few extra yards and get in Yost’s range.
Curry was in the official’s ear as soon as Cleaver hit the ground after an 8-yard pickup calling timeout. The official blew his whistle and waved his arms with more than a second on the clock, but the clock continued to run until it hit all zeros. The officials got together to discuss the situation as Wilkes-Barre’s entire team made a beeline for the locker room. Eventually the officials threw the game ball to the sideline and said the half was over, sending Curry into a fit of an rage.
“I saw 1.3 on the clock when I called timeout and I was right in the ref’s ear,” Curry said. “But he said the guy across the field didn’t have a timeout with time left. I don’t know.”
The call was exacerbated when two plays after receiving the second-half kickoff, Cleaver went 74 yards for a touchdown. A missed PAT left Berwick trailing 15-12. Wilkes-Barre pushed the lead to 22-12 when it capitalized on the first of two Cleaver interceptions by covering 40 yards in seven plays, capped by a Hubbard-Jones 6-yard scoring run.
“We’re just going to keep moving the chains,” Cinti said. “Three yards and a cloud of dust, basically. But that let us wear down the clock and win the game.”
Berwick’s last shot at getting back into the game appeared to come when it forced and recovered a fumble early in the fourth quarter. As the Bulldogs celebrated the turnover with just under 9 minutes to go, the officials huddled and declared an inadvertent whistle had been blown during the play. When an inadvertent whistle is blown, the play does not count and is re-played, taking the turnover away from Berwick. Curry lost his mind as the officials explained the call. Wilkes-Barre proceeded to run more than 4 minutes off the clock.
“It’s a good thing high school coaches hopefully can’t get fined because that was one of the worst officiated games I’ve ever seen,” Curry said afterward. “But good teams find a way to overcome bad officiating. We just weren’t good enough, and that’s the bottom line. Wilkes-Barre earned it. They played better. They had the better team tonight.”