The scoreboard showed a 50-27 score when the Fernley High School football team gathered in
the south end zone at Dayton High School last Saturday, but it wasn’t a time for celebration.
The Vaqueros got two touchdowns each from Keeshawn Love, Riley McCullar and Jayden
Esparza, plus a defensive score on a fumble recovery by Isaiah Mutte to roll past the DustDevils.
But with Nevada Day this Friday, the Vaqueros walked off the field facing a short week before
hosting Lowry at 6 p.m. Thursday night in the first round of the Northern 3A playoffs.
The win secured the No. 3 seed for the Vaqueros, which gives them a home game for the first
round. The winner of Thursday’s game will play at Fallon in the second round next week.
Coach Anfernee Sloan was happy with his squad, particularly with several backups who had to
play big minutes when several starters suffered minor injuries during Friday’s game. Sloan was
also concerned about his defense, which saw Dayton’s Duke Evans run for 290 yards and three
touchdowns. Combined with 193 passing yards, Dayton torched the Fernley defense for 464 total
yards.
“Their record, I don’t know necessarily matches the way they play football,” Sloan said. “That is
a physical Dayton football team, and I commend them for that. Much more physical than some
of the ones I’ve seen in the past.”
The early part of the game looked like the Vaqueros would have no trouble. Keeshawn Love took
Fernley’s first offensive snap 59 yards for a touchdown, and his second carry went 32 yards for
another score and Fernley led 14-0.
Just 15 seconds later, a Dayton fumble rolled from the 22-yard line all the way into the end zone,
where Mutte recovered it for a 21-0 lead with 23.8 seconds left in the first quarter.
But then Evans began to find room to run, and sometimes made room where there was none. His
18-yard touchdown cut the lead to 21-7 with 5:25 left in the first quarter,
Fernley went back up by three scores on a 30-yard touchdown pass from Bryce Stephens to Riley
McCullar, but Evans made it a 29-13 game with 1:13 left in the first half.
Esparza needed just one play to get those points back, breaking free for a 55-yard score that
made it 36-13 at the half.
McCullar and Esparza each had long touchdowns in the second half, 28 yards for McCullar and
54 yards for Esparza, which kept Dayton at bay.
“Kudos to those guys for showing up and representing their school,” Sloan said. “But again, I’m
glad that our guys came out on top and kept playing the game.”
Sloan came into the game hoping to get an early lead and take his starters out to avoid injuries.
But the plan didn’t quite work, because a handful of starters suffered a variety of dings. None are
likely to make them miss any games, but Sloan said he wants to be careful to make sure none of
them develop into the kind of injuries that do keep guys from being able to play.
“Injuries occur in a football game, and that’s normal, but when you sustain several to a bunch of
people that play crucial roles in what we do, it’s just one of those things,” he said. “We’re just
going to have to kind of augment the way they practice so we can get their bodies healthy and
get them ready for Lowry.”
Of bigger concern to Sloan was the rushing yards Evans piled up, just two weeks after Fallon’s
Carson Melendy shredded them with 357 yards.
“We’ve got to go back and kind of reevaluate what we’re going to do defensively, because this
game, the Fallon game, we just haven’t been able to stop the run,” he said. “And that’s a thing
that we need to address.”
The playoffs also bring a different sense of urgency because there’s not another game if you lose.
“You have one guaranteed opportunity to play,” Sloan said. “You have to win to keep moving on,
so yeah, we’re going to go play the game and do what we have to do and get ready for it. We’ve
got a good team, better than the ones we’ve had in the last couple of years, being a home team,
having the opportunity to play a team that our guys are going to be confident to play against.”
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