By Rick Cassano

HARRISON – Wyatt Dennis and Trey Fette took turns gobbling up yards for Harrison High School’s football team Friday night.

The backfield tandem combined for 236 rushing yards and were the key figures in the lengthy fourth-quarter drive that sealed the Wildcats’ 20-7 triumph over visiting Talawanda in front of a packed house at Bill Kuntz Field.

“That was cool,” said Dennis, a senior who totaled 143 yards on 16 carries and earned the Skyline Chili Crosstown Showdown Most Valuable Player award. “If I get tired, Trey comes in. If he gets tired, I come in. It’s nice to have fresh backs constantly on the field. Nobody gets super wore out.”

Dennis ripped off a 56-yard touchdown run in the second quarter for Harrison, while Fette carried the ball 13 times for 93 yards. Quarterback Brady Lawhon also ran for a TD and connected with a wide-open Kyle Davidson down the middle of the field for a 56-yard score that pushed the hosts ahead for good.

The Wildcats clinched at least a share of their fourth straight Southwest Ohio Conference championship, improving to 7-1 overall and 2-0 in the conference. This is the last year for SWOC football.

“It’s great to win the league title for the last time,” said Fette, a sophomore. “We’re a really good team with a lot of injuries. It’s just next man up and it doesn’t matter who because we’re all really good. Our offense picks up our defense, our defense picks up our offense. We can do whatever we need to do.”

Senior lineman Henry Hickey was part of a Harrison defense that came up with big stops throughout the evening. Talawanda scored on its first possession – Jake Van Gorden found Camar Ellis for a 35-yard touchdown – but didn't reach the end zone again.

“It’s a little shocking to know that the SWOC is ending, so it’s nice to be the final league champs,” Hickey said. “I think that we’re constantly improving every day. We’re a very, very tight group. We all grew up from kindergarten to now playing football together. We still talk every day about how we can improve and become a better team.”

The Wildcats will travel to La Salle next Friday before hosting Northwest in Week 10. A win over the Knights in the finale would give HHS the outright SWOC crown.

Harrison coach Derek Rehage’s squad has bigger goals and has clinched a Division II, Region 8 playoff spot (according to joeeitel.com), but earning a conference championship is always important.

“This team’s had big aspirations all year,” Rehage said. “I don’t see any reason why we can’t keep grinding it out.”

“Grinding” was the operative word in Friday’s victory over the Brave (6-2, 1-1). The Wildcats couldn’t get clear of Talawanda until Lawhon’s 8-yard touchdown run capped off an 18-play, 85-yard drive that devoured most of the fourth period.

Brave coach Andy Stuckert chose to punt on fourth-and-2 from the THS 42 on the first play of the fourth stanza. In retrospect, he said that was a mistake.

“It was still 14-7 and we were feeling pretty good about our defense at that time,” Stuckert said. “You risk them milking the clock, and that’s squarely on me. I just felt like defensively if we could pin them and give them a long field because they weren’t making the big chunk plays, maybe we’d get a shot and get the ball back and go down and tie it.

“Obviously in hindsight, I’d like to take that back. But I can’t do that.”

Harrison’s clinching drive covered nine minutes and 51 seconds, featuring 17 runs and one incomplete pass. It was a lot of Dennis and Fette – who both finished with career-high rushing totals – and a little bit of Lawhon and Colton Rehage. Ten yards was the longest run on the drive.

“We’re extremely blessed to have two really talented backs,” Derek Rehage said. “Our bread and butter is buck sweep, and we did a good job with that tonight. We really hadn’t had to grind like that this year. We used to the last couple years when we relied very much on Preston Flick and Cole Koops.

“Wyatt Dennis and Trey Fette are both great receivers and part of an amazing group of skill kids that we have. Once they both got going, they were hard to stop. We felt we could win in the trenches. We got Aydan Branditz back, which was a big boost, so we were playing six and seven offensive linemen all night.”

Rehage said the Brave did well in neutralizing the Wildcats’ passing game. Beyond the TD bomb to Davidson, Lawhon completed just four other passes for 11 yards.

But Harrison piled up 266 yards on the ground and averaged 7.4 yards per carry.

“It was not the game plan to run the ball down their throat the entire game, but that’s what we did,” Fette said. “We have a huge playbook, so we can run anything out of whatever we do. They couldn’t really stop the run, so why not run the same play over and over if they can’t stop it?”

Dennis has had more of a diverse role in the absence of tight end Christian Roether, who’s still out with an injury.

“I’ve had to step up and do a little more blocking than I’m used to,” Dennis said. “We have a new formation that we added where I’m out there blocking. But it was a good feeling being able to run the ball a good amount tonight.”

He felt like his touchdown burst gave the Wildcats a jolt of adrenaline in the second quarter. Lawhon connected with Davidson for their TD just 91 seconds after the Dennis score.

Dennis runs with a combination of speed and power. He said he’s added a good chunk of muscle since last season, so bringing him down is no easy task.

“Last year I was probably around 160 pounds. When I came back this offseason, I was pushing 190,” Dennis said. “I’m still not a big dude, but I try to run as hard as I can. It seems to be working for me.”

Harrison held a 14-7 lead when it kicked off in the second half. Talawanda couldn’t hang onto the ball on the kickoff and Fette recovered, but the Brave’s Kemper McAfee picked off a Davidson halfback pass two plays later.

Van Gorden converted 11-of-22 passes for 119 yards for the Brave. Brody Abney and Ethan Hainline combined for most of Talawanda’s 138 rushing yards.

“They can run the ball and their O-line is sound – they’re very good at down blocking,” Hickey said. “I expected it to be more of a physical football game, but I think we had the upper hand with just the companionship and keeping our heads cool and doing our jobs.

“We preach very strongly on our defense about discipline and toughness and playing together as one, not as individuals. Playing together as a team is very huge at Harrison. We’re not real big on defense, but we practice our technique a lot to make up for that. As a whole, I’d just say we’re tough. We don’t back down. We bend and don’t break.”

Harrison owns a 21-3 lead in the series with the Brave, who won in 1995, 2020 and 2022. The Wildcats collected a 14-0 triumph in Oxford last season.

Rehage said Harrison didn’t have school Friday, and he felt the change in routine had an effect on his team in the first half.

“But I knew it was going to be a battle,” Rehage said. “I knew Talawanda was going to play hard the whole game. I knew they were going to fight and claw and scratch.”

The Wildcats struggled in the kicking game and missed two extra points. They also came away with nothing after lining up for a 23-yard field goal in the third quarter. Rehage said miscommunication led to a fake that wasn’t called.

The Brave lost veteran offensive tackle Zeke Klenk to an injury early in the second period. Braylin Stepp took his place on the left side, even though he had never played that spot before.

“We lost the ability to pull a little bit when Zeke went out, but those things happen in this sport,” Stuckert said. “You’ve got to be resilient.”

He said the THS offense wasn’t as sharp as it needed to be, noting that the Brave were also trying to control the clock with their ground game.

“They didn’t get behind the sticks as much as we did. That’s just how those things play out sometimes,” Stuckert said. “They’ve got really good football players. I don’t think there’s anybody that wouldn’t agree with that. They’ve played a tough schedule and that senior class doesn’t know what losing is, and that gives you a huge advantage on Friday nights.

“We’re slowly getting to that point where we develop a culture of winning. That usually helps you in those close games, but we just didn’t seem to have it (tonight). I will say this … I thought we fought pretty well. I thought we had opportunities and we didn’t take advantage of them, and I’ll take the blame for that because a lot of it happened on the offensive side of the ball. You get mad at the offensive coordinator for that stuff and that’s me, but we’ll get it fixed.

“Something we can take out of this is that we can hang with just about anybody. And if we clean some things up, we can probably beat some really good football teams.”

Talawanda is in Region 8 with Harrison, so these teams could see each other again in the playoffs. The Brave will travel to Mount Healthy next Friday before closing the regular season at home against Blanchester.

“Our mission and our goals haven’t changed,” Stuckert said. “This is a game we would’ve liked to have. I think it would’ve been huge for our program, but it’s not the last game of the year for us.

“Going back and correcting some things and really cleaning some stuff up, especially with the offense we’re developing right now, I think we can be pretty dangerous. With another week of film and more practice time, I think we’ll be even more lethal and be able to finish some of those drives.”

Talawanda 7-0-0-0 -- 7

Harrison 0-14-0-6 -- 20

T: Camar Ellis 35 pass from Jake Van Gorden (Brayden Kent kick)

H: Wyatt Dennis 56 run (Kick failed)

H: Kyle Davidson 56 pass from Brady Lawhon (Colton Rehage pass from Lawhon)

H: Lawhon 8 run (Kick failed)

Records: T 6-2, 1-1 SWOC; H 7-1, 2-0 SWOC