The Lone Tree Lions almost held the Central City Wildcats scoreless on Friday, Aug. 27, but Central City scored a touchdown with 20 seconds remaining in the game, making the final score 38-8. 

It was just the second touchdown allowed by Lone Tree over the first two games.

Lone Tree captured the momentum early in the game by forcing turnovers. The Lions scored off seven snaps in their first possession, then forced Central City to fumble on their third play. Junior Mitch Koedam recovered the fumble on the Central City 20-yard line.

Two flags, for procedure and holding, and a tackle-for-loss brought the Lions to third-and-12, but a 21-yard pass to Cade Patterson brought Lone Tree up to first-and-goal, where quarterback Cade Shield easily punched it in to put the Lions up 16-0. 

Then, Central City fumbled again on the first play of their next possession, which was recovered by Patterson and, after a fourth-down conversion, resulted in another touchdown to put the Lions up 22-0 near the end of the first quarter. 

“Forcing turnovers is huge, especially in eight-man, because it’s so hard to stop the other team sometimes because you have three less defenders. We get in a lot of shoot-out games, so any time you’re able to steal a possession, it really works in your favor,” said Lone Tree head coach Aaron Bohr. “That’s something that we’ve been preaching quite a bit over the last week in practice. It really does help. It deflates the other team, and you get the ball usually in good field position and then from there you’ve got to be able to capitalize. Fortunately, in that first quarter, we took advantage of our opportunities.”

Lone Tree did not score again until the fourth quarter, but the Lions defense also kept the Wildcats off the board. Coach Bohr said Central City is “really tough” to game plan for due to their unique offense. 

“They have a lot of backfield motion, a lot of deception, a lot of decoys and they don’t give you too much time to get ready,  either, as they kind of huddle and break right before they get to the line,” Bohr said. “It was one of those things that was really important for guys to get in there, really important for guys to know what they were doing.”

Lone Tree held the Wildcats to only 74 passing yards, with Central City Quarterback Jayden Hansen completing 5 of 11 attempts, and only 62 rushing yards.

Central City struggled with their snap throughout the game, which Bohr contributed, in part, to intimidation from the Lions lineman Koedam. 

“It’s not a coincidence that when [Koedam] is lining up over that center, and he’s been putting that time in in the weight room and that guy has to worry about blocking him, that that center is launching those snaps into the ground and over the quarterback’s head.” 

The Lions (2-0) will play next at English Valleys (1-0) at 7 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 3.