On September 19th, the Rockville Rams took on the MSW Huskies at the Ethel Peters Memorial Complex, walking away with a landslide 48-0 victory over the MSW football team.
Rockville has made the playoffs six of the last seven years, while Morgan/MSW has made the playoffs three of the last 10. Rockville is already 1-0 this season with their previous win against Coventry, 48-6. Last week, MSW and Valley faced off at Valley, with Morgan losing 12-18. Rockville has had six consecutive wins against Morgan/MSW since joining the Pequot conference in 2019. Knowing the previous records of both teams, Coach Casey Trasacco went into the game with confidence, but knowing that hard work was necessary.
“You know, they played Coventry well. Every week, we have to play our best version of football. We can’t worry about what other teams do. We have to come out and play MSW football, do our job, and give a lot of maximum effort.”
Trasacco grew up playing high school football at Hyde, where he gained experience playing talented teams ranked higher than his own and used that experience to prepare for this challenge.
“Whenever you play a team above, you have to play above what you usually play. You know, whenever I was in high school playing sports, if we had a good team coming up, we ramped up practice more and more. And we prepared at an even higher level because we wanted to be together.”
Due to being a class S school, MSW plays a majority of the same players offensively and defensively, while Rockville, a class M school, has many different players in different positions, due to the larger size of their team.
“They have more bodies. You know, they probably have fewer players going both ways. Talent-wise, I mean, they’re still high school kids. We have talented players, they have talented players.”
Going into the game, Senior Captain Christian Harris accepted the challenge they were facing.
“Going into the game, there’s a select few people on the team who actually thought we had a chance to win, so, you know, trying to get everyone to have the’ we can win’ mindset is the hardest part.”
The game immediately started in Rockville’s favor as they took a convincing 20-0 lead into the second quarter thanks to an interception returned for a touchdown in the first quarter. Rockville added 14 more in the second quarter and took a 34-0 lead into halftime. Rockville then switched things over to their JV team, which was able to add 14 more points on the board in the second half, giving Rockville a 48-0 win.
MSW had some unfortunate defensive injuries throughout this game. Such as key players Xzavion Clark and Tristan Elliot, who weren’t significantly injured and will be able to play next week. This impacted the team and made different players play in spots they’re not used to.
“We tried moving guys around, we tried opening things up on offense, defensively, had some injuries, had to move some guys in spots or not used to. We tried to keep everything in front of us and not give up the big play. We did give up some big plays.”
Next Week, MSW faces North Branford, who has a record of 1-1, against MSW’s record of 0-2.
Coach Trasacco ended with saying, “North Branford, I think we matched up pretty evenly with. They’re going to have them with depth, but I think talent-wise, we’re a pretty even matchup. So I think it’d be a competitive game.”
