SYRACUSE – Heading north on I-81, several miles south of the city is when you first see it: The Dome.
With a max capacity of 49,057 spectators, you can’t not see it.
The famous home arena of former Syracuse University greats like Pearl Washington, Donovan McNabb, and Carmelo Anthony, the JMA Wireless Dome has also hosted the New York state high school football championships for the past 32 years.
For thousands of high school football players, getting a chance to take the field inside that awe-inspiring structure is the reward of a lifetime.
For Rye senior captains Carson Miller and Henry Shoemaker, it was just another field to toss the ball around. The duo combined for all four of Rye’s scores in Friday’s 28-14 state championship victory, adding to their Section 1 record yardage and touchdown totals in the process.
Section 5 champion Brighton High School (from Rochester) – and their defensive backs – had certainly heard the names Miller and Shoemaker. Most folks with an interest in New York high school football this season had. When you’re the top quarterback and receiver duo in the state, word gets around.
The very first play of the game was a go route to Shoemaker, the 6-foot-5 Harvard-bound wide receiver. Why not? The triple-teamed Shoemaker had a step on his defenders, but the ball was just slightly overthrown. Most of Miller’s passes for the remainder of the game were right on target, as he finished 16 of 21 for 252 yards. More than half of those yards (131) were to Shoemaker.
At the end of the first quarter, Rye led 6-0 thanks to a 1-yard Miller run. After falling behind 7-6 (briefly) in the second quarter, Miller found Shoemaker for 16- and 8-yard touchdowns to make it 20-7 Rye at halftime. The Garnets, who won all 14 games they played this season by double-digits, appeared to be in control once again.
The third – and ultimately game-defining – quarter was not so relaxing for coach Dino Garr and the Rye fans. After a third-down stop, the Garnets roughed Brighton’s punter, forcing Rye to put its defense back on the field and allowing the Bruins to find a bit of rhythm in their passing game.
But later in the drive, with Brighton facing a fourth-and-short from Rye’s 14-yard line, the stalwart Garnet defense – seniors Hunter Gillies, Carsten Steinmann, Nigel Strazzini, Jack Anderson, and junior Jagger Fenton – rose up at the biggest moment of their high school football lives and forced Brighton to turn the ball over on downs. A conversion at that point could have quickly made it a one-score game, and with a large contingent of Bruin fans in the house, may have changed the outcome significantly.
The defensive stop was the play of the game, but Miller and Shoemaker weren’t done making highlights of their own just yet. A few minutes later, on a third-and-long for Rye, Miller scrambled to his left in the pocket, barely avoided a sack, and threw a 50-yard bomb, not to where Shoemaker was, but where he would be.
Shoemaker made the catch, shook his defender, and this legendary duo’s final touchdown was a 68-yard dream no one in attendance will ever forget.
Syracuse’s cavernous Dome may be the biggest stage for high school football in the state, in terms of both stakes and dimensions, but in the final game of their Garnet careers, Miller and Shoemaker managed to reach a ceiling few QB-WR duos in state history have ever come close to touching.
