Exeter football has answers for Nashua South in D1 quarterfinal win

EXETER — All the effort given by the Nashua High School South football team to sustain productive drives during Saturday’s Division I football quarter final against Exeter High School, was cancelled out all afternoon by a Blue Hawks offense that didn’t need much time to deliver plenty of damage.

South ran 88 plays on the day, compared to 32 for Exeter, but the Blue Hawks made the most of every snap by averaging 14 yards a play towards a 453-yard output in Exeter’s 42-27 victory at William Ball Stadium. 

Senior running back Derek Edmiston was at the center of Exeter’s lethal quick-strike attack by rushing for 249 yards on 12 carries with four touchdown runs of 64, 20, 83 and 59 yards. Jaedon Cliche added 156 rushing yards on eight carries, as Exeter had seven plays of at least 20-plus yards.

“When they put up drives that last six or seven minutes it’s obviously going to be tiring for them,” Edmiston said. “Then we catch them for one play for like 60 yards, it’s going to hurt them.”

Second-seeded Exeter (9-1) hosts No. 4 Merrimack (7-3) in next week’s East/West Cluster half of the Division I semifinals, after the Tomahawks’ 26-7 win over No. 1 Nashua North (9-1). 

Exeter was coming off a 30-14 win over No. 3 South (6-4) in last week’s regular-season finale. The Panthers outgained Exeter with 463 yards, led by running back Jason Campoh’s 135 rushing yards on 30 carries with three touchdowns. South quarterback Chris Keefe ran for 122 yards on 16 carries with a touchdown, and he completed 17 of 22 passes for 167 yards.

“We had our hands full,” Exeter coach Bill Ball said. “We ran a few things that we hadn’t run in a while and it worked out well. It was just a real good effort against a really good team. We’ve got to do some things better defensively, but a lot of that was South.”

Edmiston took the third play of the game 64 yards into the end zone, but South responded with a 16-play drive that ended with a 2-yard scoring run by Compoh to tie the game at 7-7 with 5:32 left in the first quarter. 

Exeter’s longest drive of the day came when Edmiston capped off a 12-play, 70-yard drive midway through the second quarter with his 20-yard touchdown run. Edmiston’s 83-yard scoring run gave Exeter a 21-7 lead with 1:32 left in the first half.

Keefe, who took over at quarterback for injured starter Michael Rutstein in a Week 5 loss to North, showed constant determination to keep his team in the game. He broke off a 40-yard touchdown run of the edge down the left sideline on the opening drive of the second half to bring South within 21-14 with 8:03 left in the third quarter.

“We always show fight,” Keefe said. “We always had our heads up, we never broke down and we kept driving the ball down field.”

South’s defense then forced a third-and-9, but Exeter pulled off a favorite trick when Spencer Clark’s handoff on a double-counter resulted on a 66-yard run by Cliche. Exeter quarterback Ryan Grijalva delivered a 1-yard keeper on the next play to give Exeter a 28-14 lead with 6:08 left in the third quarter.

“Basically what they were doing was that they were slanting to the off-tackle in the first half, so our up the middle plays were wide open,’ Cliche said. “So in the second half, they started to defend the middle, so we ran off-tackle and ran outside.”

South responded with an 18-play, 68-yard drive that ended with a 23-yard completion from Keefe to Jacob Smith on third-and-18, and Compoh scored from six yards out on the next play to bring South within 28-21 with 9:54 left in the fourth quarter.

The Panthers’ momentum was quickly halted, as Edmiston ran into the end zone from 59 yards on the ensuing play to give Exeter a 35-21 lead with 9:39 left in regulation.

“You just can’t give up big plays,” South coach Scott Knight said. “We were watching film throughout the game and we were missing tackles. When you have a chance to tackle, you have to put them on the ground. There were a couple of plays where we missed two tackles. You can’t do that against these guys.”

South again responded with a 13-play drive that ended with 5-yard touchdown run by Compoh on fourth-and-3, but Cliche broke off a 68-yard touchdown run on the ensuing drive to give Exeter a 42-27 lead with two minutes left in the game.

Next up for Exeter is a Merrimack team that it defeated, 41-7, in the third week of the regular season. The winner plays Salem (8-2) or Londonderry (10-0) in the Division I championship game at the University of New Hampshire on Nov. 23.

“It was a solid effort, we’ll have to play better next week defensively for sure,” Ball said. “It’s just great to play another game.”