The Rye football team was itching to get after it. No more talk. Just play.
After three weeks of practice – mostly amongst themselves – and one informal scrimmage against Class C Bronxville, the defending Class A state champion Garnets wanted some live action.
In Friday’s Week 0 opening game, Rye handled as much action as Cornwall could offer, defeating the Green Dragons 39-21 in front of a festive home crowd at Nugent Stadium.
Yes, it was just one game, but Rye head coach Dina Garr liked what he saw.
“Definitely a good start,” he said. “We anticipated that an excellent Cornwall team was going to come in here with some emotion tonight, and play with a great deal of force. We saw that same effort from them last year in the playoffs. We made a few mistakes in the early going, but I thought we got better as the game progressed. It didn’t hurt tonight that we had Charlie Brady over center.”
It only hurt if you tried to catch him.
In his first career start leading the Garnets’ offense, Brady broke loose for 244 yards on the ground and five rushing touchdowns. The senior quarterback also passed for a tidy 82 yards.
“We hadn’t planned, coming into this game, for me to run as much as we did tonight,” Brady admitted. “Because of the humidity tonight, the ball was a little slippery, made it tough to throw. I knew that if the pocket broke down, which it did a few times, I needed to get out of there fast and use my legs.”
In a rematch of last year’s state semifinal, Rye drove 88 yards on its opening possession, capping the drive with Brady’s first touchdown, from 1 yard out.
Cornwall responded to go ahead 7-6, but it was the Dragons’ only lead of the game. Brady scored on 58- and 55-yard runs to give Rye the lead for good.
Cornwall cut the lead to five points before halftime, but Brady scampered for yet another score in the third quarter, this time from 40 yards out, for a two-score lead.
The senior Garnet quarterback’s fifth touchdown run late in the fourth quarter put the game away.
Breaking tackles and taking what looked like 3- to 4-yard strides as he powered up to full speed, Brady might even have made a few of the Rye faithful forget about the kid who quarterbacked the Garnet offense last year.
“Charlie is an instinctive, athletic player,” Garr said. “Cornwall was putting a great deal of pressure on our offensive line in the first half. We started to neutralize their blitz a bit in the second half and Charlie got into a nice rhythm running the ball.”
Brady had plenty of help. Senior running back/linebacker and co-captain Jagger Fenton had a strong game on both sides of the ball, rushing for 90 yards on 13 carries. Junior linebacker Nick Holohan was stout for Rye’s defense. Junior Evans Anderson and senior co-captain Benji Kaplan were fixtures on the interior line.
For Kaplan, the game couldn’t come soon enough.
“It was fun tonight,” Kaplan said. “We were looking forward to this one. At home, Friday night lights, good crowd. We played with some early-season grit tonight which was great to see – and feel. We had a few mistakes in the first half, but I was proud of the way we came together in the second half.”
The Garnets have a short wait before facing their second opponent of the season, with a rare Thursday night game at Clarkstown South.
