Brickner’s big night carries Beaver Falls over Keystone Oaks

By: HSSN Staff
Friday, October 5, 2018 | 11:39 PM

Dayln Brickner wants to play football and baseball at the next level.

Already with a baseball offer from Youngstown State, the Beaver Falls senior quarterback also picked up a football offer from the school Friday afternoon.

On Friday night, Brickner showed why.

Brickner ran for 248 yards, threw for 58 more, and accounted for five touchdowns, as the No. 5 Tigers (6-1, 4-1) dropped Keystone Oaks, 41-21, at Geneva College’s Reeves Field.

“He’s an amazing football player,” Beaver Falls coach Nick Nardone said of Brickner, who stepped in at quarterback for injured starter Noah Vaughn. “He’s an amazing athlete. The stuff he does, I’ve never seen people do.”

Brickner’s most impressive moment came with no time left on the first-half clock, as he took a snap, ran left, then right, then back to the left, shedding several tacklers and finding his way into the end zone for a 36-yard run.

“Unbelievable,” Nardone said of the play, which gave the Tigers a 21-14 halftime lead. “To give our team a spark like that, that lit us up.”

“I saw it open up wide to the left,” Brickner said. “I saw that nobody was on the right side of the field, except the corner, one-on-one. I expect to beat somebody one-on-one.”

The play helped Beaver Falls shake off a slow start. Keystone Oaks (4-3, 2-3) jumped out to a 7-0 lead on its first play from scrimmage, as sophomore quarterback Logan Shrubb connected with C.J. Morrow for a 65-yard score.

The Tigers answered on a Brickner 1-yard plunge to even the game. Shrubb, who ran for 145 yards and passed for 158, responded with a 5-yard touchdown pass to give the Golden Eagles the lead right back.

But, with Keystone Oaks driving late in the second quarter, Beaver Falls linebacker Josh Hough tipped a short pass, intercepted the ball, and outran Shrubb for a 44-yard touchdown, swinging momentum before Brickner’s electrifying run.

“A couple plays here and there, I thought, could have been advantageous for us,” Keystone Oaks coach Greg Perry said. “They made them.”

The Tigers defense held tight in the second half, holding the WPIAL’s third-leading rusher and leading scorer, Michael Dauer, to just 42 rushing yards and no points.

Despite not completing any of his five pass attempts in the first half, Brickner came back to throw touchdowns to Amen Cottrill and Dante Collins in the third quarter, pushing the lead to 34-14.

Shrubb tried to get the Golden Eagles back in the game, breaking seven tackles on a 28-yard touchdown run to make it 34-21.

“He’s a good player, he’s a hard-nosed kid,” Perry said. “He wants to win. You can tell when kids have that. He has that.”

Despite not scoring, Beaver Falls iced the game on a 9-minute, 48 second drive in the fourth quarter. Hough was the focal point of the series and finished with 114 rushing yards. Brickner capped things off with a late, 40-yard scoring run.

“Josh Hough ran the ball like a man tonight,” Nardone said. “(Cottrill) ran the ball tough. Those kids played out of their minds in the second half.”

With wins over Keystone Oaks, Central Valley and Quaker Valley, Beaver Falls appears to be in the midst of a massive turnaround following a 2017 season in which the Tigers won just one game.

“It’s amazing,” Brickner said. “Everybody’s picking up. As soon as that season was over, everybody came together, everybody worked throughout the spring and the summer and now it’s all coming together.”

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Josh Rowntree is a freelance writer.

Tags: Beaver Falls, Keystone Oaks