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High School Football:
Woodbury Runs Over Haddon Heights For Home Victory

Saturday, September 29, 2001

By Vincent Lewis
SJSports Staff Writer

Who told Woodbury they were supposed to lose Saturday morning's game on their own field? The Herd were hosting the highly favored Garnets of Haddon Heights in search of their first win of the season. Haddon Heights were starting their season off with three straight wins and potential securing a playoff position with a win on the road. Woodbury was the team looking like they ready for the post season as they shutout Haddon Height 14-0 in a Colonial Conference game.

No team enjoys losing a game after all of the hard work the they puts in during the week. The coaches going over all of the plays that were not executed properly in hopes of fixing some of the reasons they were beaten. Now for a winning team, there's so much confidence in knowing their work on the practice field has paid off with a winning record. So today's game had an interesting twist with Woodbury losing their first 3 games hosting Haddon Heights with a record of three wins and no loses.

The initial twelve minutes of the game was a scoreless quarter were both teams just traded punts. The defense highlighted the game with constant pressure on the quarterback forcing them to throw the ball away. The Herd's starting quarterback Melvin River began using his legs to move the ball down field. With that threat and spreading out the Garnets defense, sophomore fullback Chris Pressley starting finding the wholes to run through. His success running the ball set up the game's first points on the scoreboard. River dropped back to pass to the right, but then rolled left in an attempt to run. Instead, River found senior wide out Josh Knight for a 12-yard touchdown with 4:57 remaining in the half. Haddon Heights would move their offense into scoring position after recovering a fumble with 2:09 showing on the clock. The Herd's defense would come up with a key tackle in bounds at the 6-yard line to run out the clock.

Coming out of the locker room, Woodbury went right to work with the running game. Pressley and River were the tandem picking up chewing up yards in route to their second touchdown of the game. Pressley bulldozed his way on runs of 16 and 14-yards to give Woodbury the ball at their opponents five yard line. On the very next play, Josh Knight ran the ball over the left tackle for the 5-yard touchdown. After River completed the two point conversion pass to Rahmod Noel, those points would complete the scoring of the game.

Photos by Art Redd

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