Kirtland motivated for gold trophy

LB Boyd: ‘We want to get back there and show we are a championship team’

The quietiest of hushes came across the visitor’s locker room at Tom Benson Hall of Fame Stadium on Dec. 3, 2022.

It was so quiet you could have heard a chin strap snap as the Kirtland football team gathered its things and headed home after a 14-6 loss to Marion Local in the Division VI state championship game.

One by one, the Hornets passed by a table on which sat the silver state runnerup trophy.

“The trophy, no one even wanted to hold it or look at it,” linebacker Macguire Boyd said. “It sucked.”

“I didn’t even look at it,” defensive back Will Sayle said.

Here we are eight months later, and feelings haven’t changed much. While Coach Tiger LaVerde joked that, “I’m not sure that trophy made it back from Canton. The kids didn’t want it,” the trophy DOES have a home in Kirtland’s trophy case — but it’s receiving

so little attention that it’s probably dying of loneliness.

But that silver state runner-up trophy DOES serve a purpose. It is the driving

force behind a motivated 2023 Kirtland football team that is bent on getting back to Tom Benson Hall of Fame Stadium this December to finish things

they way they wanted to back on Dec. 3, 2022.

“I don’t know if we’re angry about it, but we’re pretty upset about it,” said Boyd, now a senior. “We want to

get our revenge this year. We want to get back there and show we are a championship team.”

The parts are certainly in place to make a run at it. Kirtland graduated only 10 seniors last year, and it returns more than 20 letterwinners to this year’s team, including most of a defense that allowed only 5.5 points per game last season, a 1,000-yard quarterback in Jake LaVerde, a 1,400-yard rusher in Rocco Alfieri and an all-around standout in receiver/defensive back Gino Blasini.

Oh, the Hornets also return with an axe to grind.

“Yeah, of course there’s an axe to grind,” Blasini said. “We have a chip on our shoulders going into the season. We don’t want a silver trophy.”

The game with Marion Local was every bit the classic everyone thought it would be. The Flyers led, 14-0, on a pick-six by Nathan Buscher in the third quarter before the Hornets closed the gap on a 10-yard scoring pass from Jake LaVerde to Sayle.

But that’s the way it ended.

Hence the Hornets’ disdain.

“It was an option read to the left and a quick pop seam pass to the right,” the son of Coach Tiger LaVerde said of the interception. “They were in Cover 2, the safety jumped it and made a good play.

BRIAN FISHER — FOR THE NEWS-HERALD At one point, the silver runner-up trophy from the 2022Division VI state championship game was believed to have been left behind in Canton because none of the Kirtland players wanted it.