Hollis Brookline football made the right moves throughout to pick up first title

The start of Sunday's Division II championship game couldn't have been much worse for the Hollis Brookline High School football team.

Plymouth needed just six plays to go 63 yards and find the end zone to take a 7-0 lead over the Cavaliers less than three minutes into the game.

The weather was already going to be a factor for HB, as the wind and rain made it tough to throw the ball all day, and if the Cavs were going to have to play catchup against the three-time defending D2 champs, it had the potential for a long game.

"This team isn’t going to come down here and lay down and give it up," HB coach Chris Lones said of his message to the team. "They’ve won three-straight championships. They got back here because they’re good.

"You want to be the champion, you’re going to have to battle through some stuff to get there. They scored on the first drive. Here’s your adversity. We’re going to battle through this. We just kept on working."

HB (10-2) did just that on offense, piling up 356 rushing yards on the way to a 24-13 win over the Bobcats in the D2 title game, giving the program its first championship.

But while the Cavs' offense was racking up the yards, the defense was coming together to start to take away what Plymouth wanted to do. And after rushing for 130 yards on 21 carries in the first half, the Bobcats had just 75 yards on the same number of attempts after halftime.

"They were really running through C-gap," HB senior Sander Wimmer said. "We brought (twin brother) Quinten (Wimmer) in from free safety and put him at linebacker just to get a bigger body in there. That made them have to adjust and they couldn’t really get outside on us.

"In-game position adjustments and also just keeping in the back of our mind that just because they scored doesn’t mean we can’t stop them. We knew our defense was tough and we could hang with them."

Although the Bobcats did finish the game with more passing yards than the Cavs (54-3), they didn't throw a pass until the fourth quarter, meaning Quinten Wimmer didn't have much to do from his safety position early in the game.

"Playing free safety, I feel out of the loop," he said. "I’m pass first at free safety and they just kept running the ball. I’m a big body. I’ve practiced it so I knew the position pretty well. Putting me there, I felt like it hopefully intimidated them to stop running that."

Perhaps the defense's biggest play of the game came late in the third quarter, after Plymouth had the ball for over seven minutes, looking to answer an HB score that had made it a 16-7 game.

On fourth-and-5 at the Cavs' 21-yard line, Cody Bannon (22 carries, 148 yards) was stopped for a 1-yard gain by Adam Slater and Austin Etchells to give HB the ball back. And on the next play, the Cavs broke the big play they needed.

Marc-Andre Thermitus took a handoff from Sander Wimmer, cut to the outside and ran 62 yards to the Plymouth 18 on the final play of the third quarter.

"It was an inside run play," Sander Wimmer said. "Marc has great vision and there was an opening on the outside. I remember watching him make that cut and chasing him as he ran by everybody. A smile was on my face, I know that for sure."

Three plays later, Quinten Wimmer scored his third touchdown of the game from eight yards out and Sander Wimmer added the two-point conversion to make it 24-7 with 10:51 remaining.

"Great read," Lones said. "(Thermitus) made an incredible cut inside and we blocked upfront. We blocked, we got to the second level and Marc just made a great cut. He made the first kid miss, and that’s all you have to do. You make him miss and he’s off to the races."

After missing the playoffs last year, and falling in the quarterfinals to Hanover as sophomores, this year's senior class was finally able to break through and do what no other team in HB history had done.

"Every year, I feel like we should win," Quinten Wimmer said. "To finally actually do, it’s a surreal feeling. Credit to all these boys for working as hard as they did this season."