Criminals, Shamrocks scrimmage at Doan Field

On the final Friday night for the foreseeable future without high school football, Yuma Catholic and Yuma High met at Doan Field for their annual scrimmage.

For Yuma Catholic, the 80-play scrimmage — which lasted close to an hour-and-a-half — represented the final tune-up before next week’s season opener against San Manuel. Yuma High still has two more weeks of practice before its season begins Aug. 24 against Calexico (Calif.). Each team possessed the ball four times, with each possession beginning at the 50-yard line and lasting 10 plays — with the ball going back to the 50 if a first down wasn’t gained or the ball was turned over. Yuma Catholic scored seven times on the night, while the Criminals failed to find the end zone — not that either team was keeping score. “With the amount of preparation that we had as opposed to them, I was OK with our effort,” Yuma High coach Curt Weber said. “We were really vanilla. They’re a lot further ahead than we are right now. They’re quick. The good news is we don’t play until the 24th, so we got all this in now and now we can really focus on what we need to improve on.”

“We’ll watch the film, find out what we’ve got to work on,” YC coach Rhett Stallworth said. “It is what it is. The good plays stick out easy and there’s a lot of bad in between.”

All seven of YC’s touchdowns came from outside the red zone, with six coming through the air.

“Yuma Catholic can throw the football, we knew that,” Weber said. “I liked our run defense with the exception of one run. I saw some holes for our running backs, it’s just a matter of staying on the blocks.”

Stallworth said he’d like to see the Shamrocks get better up front.

“We did a poor job keeping contain on defense and we did a poor job sustaining blocks up front on of-