- All
Harrison rolls past Fenton in first round, star QB Shaw may be lost for remainder of season
Fenton – On Saturday night, Farmington Hills Harrison avenged a playoff loss to Fenton from two years ago with a dominating 42-10 win in first round playoff action, but the win may have come at a cost.
In the third quarter on a punt return, Harrison star quarterback Jevon Shaw went down to the ground writhing in pain for a couple of minutes before being helped to the sidelines and was not able to return to the game.
“It doesn’t look good,” said longtime Harrison coach John Herrington after Saturday night’s win. “It might be a torn ACL, we don’t know. It’s a tremendously big blow if it’s true, but we don’t know yet.”
Just before his injury, Shaw took off on a 59 yard touchdown score with 7:48 left to play in the third quarter to give Harrison a 14-10 advantage, its first lead of the day.
After the Harrison defense forced a quick Fenton punt on the ensuing drive, Shaw came out with a strong return before going down with an injury.
But stepping in for Shaw, backup quarterback David Vinsky stepped in and helped guide the Harrison offense in the final 16 minutes of the game.
With Harrison still leading 14-10 entering the fourth quarter, the Hawks began pulling away as Brendann Brown scored on 10 yard run on the first play of the fourth quarter and less than 30 seconds later, a 37 yard interception return for touchdown by Tyrone Lyte pushed the Hawks lead to 28-10.
“That put us out of reach,” Herrington said of the start of the fourth quarter. “That was big and I thought that once we got the touchdown to go ahead, I thought we’d be in pretty good shape. We were playing good defense for pretty much the entire night.”
Harrison would add a touchdown run with less than five minutes left in the game as Brown punched it in from one yard out to make it 35-10 and a long touchdown run by Jared Char with 1:08 left to play put the game away and sealed the 42-10 win for the Hawks.
But looking ahead to next week against Walled Lake Western, which is coming off of a 14-13 win over South Lyon on Friday night, the Hawks quarterback situation is still up in the air, but Herrington said he was pleased with the play of Vinsky throughout the remainder of Saturday’s win.
“He did well,” he said. “He stepped in and did a nice job and truthfully, I didn’t give him very many reps this week. He stepped in and did a good job and he’s going to have to step up next week and do a really good job. There’s no question about it. Jevon is the heart and soul of our team, and someone else is going to have to step up.”
The potential loss of Shaw brings up memories for Herrington of his team losing a star quarterback in Jake Vento, who was forced out of action in the playoff due to injury in 2011, when the Hawks were in search of repeating as Division 2 state champions.
“I thought about that,” he said. “If he’s gone, it’s very similar. Jake stirred the straw with all of those great players. Everybody’s supposed to say, ‘Hey, it’s the next man in’ but it’ll be a tough next man in if we don’t have him, but we have other players on the team that obviously have to step up.”
