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Calvin Battees and Ben Rex making the tackle.
The Cook County High School Vikings football season came to an end in Cherry last Saturday when the Vikings were defeated 68-8 to finish their play-off run. The Vikings beat Hill City/Northland in the first play-off game to advance to the second round.
This was the second meeting this season between the two teams with Cherry taking the first contest 62-0.
With the loss the Vikings ended with a 5-4 record.
Cherry’s win secured a match-up with 9-0 Mountain Iron-Buhl; MIB beat Cherry by 12 points earlier this year.
Cherry used a smothering defense and potent offense to stymie the Vikings. Other than the first sequence of plays to start the game, the Vikings offense was stopped with drives ending in punts, fumbles or interceptions. The Vikings did get the ball to Cherry’s 25-yard line on their first series but that ended in a fumble recovered by Cherry. The Tigers only needed a few plays to take the ball downfield and score. With eight minutes to play in the third quarter the score was 62-0. Late in the fourth quarter MaCoy Fairbanks caught a pass and scored with Payton Morrison taking in the twopoint conversion.
Some of the senior girls came out to support our senior boys for what ended up being their last football game. Pictured left to right…. Kole Anderson, Katie Peck, Ryan Christiansen, Makenzie Fairbanks, Ben Rex, Emmalli Myers, and Payton Morrison
If the Vikings can take some solace three of their losses—two to Cherry and one to Mountain Iron-Buhl, have come against two of the state’s best nine-man teams. Chery is ranked 8th and MIB 4th in the state 9-man rankings. The Vikings’ other loss came against the 7-2 Ogilvie Lions, who are ranked 23rd in state.
Season stats
Senior Kole Anderson played fullback on offense and defensive tackle/inside linebacker on defense. On defense Kole led the team— and state nine-man field– with 138 tackles, averaging 15.4 tackles a game. The next highest tackle total came from Peyton Roe, LeRoy- Ostrander, a linebacker who made 104 tackles.
On offense Kole had six touchdowns and scored 58 points, often on short yardage runs into the endzone or scoring the two-point conversions.
Despite missing some games to injury Junior linebacker Ray Dressely finished with 49 tackles, rushed for 252 yards and caught balls for 258 yards.
Senior Ben Rex had 50 tackles while sophomores Rohan Rude had 48 and Rayce Gibson 46; juniors Calvin Battees had 33 and Reuben Youngdahl 24.
Senior Ryan Christiansen had three interceptions and ended with 50 tackles. On offense Ryan averaged 58 yards rushing and 46.4 yards per game catching the ball. Overall, Ryan ran for 464 yards and had 407 yards in receptions. He led the team with 86 points, finishing with 14 touchdowns to tie for first in the state with two other players, Beau Wiersma of Kingsland and Cooper Freitag of Cedar Mountain.
Ryan Smith led in quarterback sacks with 5 while Cade Smith had 2.5 sacks.
Sophomore quarterback Hunter Rex threw for 994 yards and rushed for 208 yards. Junior Amos Falter finished with 181 yards of catches and 323 yards on kick-off and punt returns while fellow junior Recko Helmerson-Skildum ended with 82 yards in catches. Eighth grader MaCoy Fairbanks had 158 yards of receptions.
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