High school football: Gouverneur defeats rival Ogdensburg Free Academy, 14-8

Cap Carey, Watertown Daily Times, N.Y.
·4 min read

Apr. 17—OGDENSBURG — Gouverneur senior running back JoJo Cummings played a determined game and led the Wildcats football team to a 14-8 win over Ogdensburg Free Academy in the nonleague opener for both teams Friday night.

The Wildcats, who last played in the state Class C title game in 2019, had to work hard to extend their win streak against Section 10 teams in the regular-season games to 29.

The longest plays Gouverneur had from scrimmage were a pair of 13-yard runs. Cummings led the Wildcats with 126 yards on 25 carries, but they were mostly physical yards, with him carrying a pile of players as far as nine yards a few times.

"I was thinking to just keep running my feet, I know my guys are holding me up," Cummings said of those runs. "We played a lot of games on this field. It's always nice to come here and play those guys. They are always tough. They hit hard, they like to be physical and they are fast. We like to come out here under the lights and do our thing."

Gouverneur started the game with 13-play drive that reached the OFA 22-yard line before stalling on downs. The drive took nearly eight minutes and set a tone for how the game would be played.

Late in the first quarter, Gouverneur took over after a punt on its own 24 and mounted another long drive before scoring the first touchdown of the game.

The Wildcats moved 76 yards on 10 plays. Quarterback Connor Wood gained 13 yards on one play and completed a 10-yard pass to Cummings later. Jared Wilson picked up 10 yards on one carry and eight on the next to get the ball down to the OFA 8.

From there, Cummings took over, bursting through the line and running into the end zone for a touchdown with 1 minute, 13 seconds left in the half. Kyle Gaumes, who played soccer for the Wildcats, kicked an extra point to put the Wildcats up 7-0.

OFA appeared headed for a disastrous ending to the half when the ball was snapped over the head of quarterback Tristan Lovely on two straight plays, putting OFA on its own 8 with seven seconds left in the half.

Lovely had to handle a difficult snap for a third straight time, but when he started running to get out of danger, it wound up turning into a 92-yard touchdown run as time expired. Lovely finished with 130 yards on nine carries.

Adam Calton, a Heuvelton student who was Canton's quarterback last year, scored on the two-point conversion to give OFA an 8-7 halftime lead. Calton is with the Blue Devils now as OFA once again has a merger agreement with Heuvelton.

"I thought our kids played with a lot of heart," OFA coach Matt Tessmer said. "We had a lot of young guys out there today and the mistakes showed up. We didn't know what we were doing a few times. At the end of the day the kids played well. We had a chance to win it. We have to get to that tier where we get over that hump. Gouverneur is a great team, a great championship contender."

Neither team threatened to score for most of the third quarter, but the Wildcats pounced on an OFA fumble on the Blue Devils 45 with 54.9 seconds left in the quarter.

That wound up being the turning point in the game as Gouverneur took advantage of the defensive play by going on a 10-play drive to score the winning touchdown.

Cummings did much of the work of the winning drive, carrying the ball on the first seven plays and eight of the 10. The winning touchdown came on a 1-yard plunge by Wood, followed by an extra-point kick from Gaumes with 8:17 left.

"I knew it was going to be just the way it was tonight," Wildcats coach Sean Devlin said. "I didn't know which way it was going to go, but I knew it would be very close. I thought it would be much more high-scoring. The Lovely kid is very good and they've got a couple kids that really can run. Our guys have been there and they stepped up when they needed too. We played pretty cleanly. We are happy with the way our guys played. We're happy to just be playing football."

OFA's last chance to win the game came to an end when a fourth-down pass was incomplete with 3:59 remaining. Gouverneur ran out the clock with more rushing plays.