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Saints stumble in home opener

September 14, 2003|by JACK HILL III

ST. JAMES - The St. James Saints could not stop the offense of the Sidwell Friends Quakers in the first half.

As a result, the Quakers scored all of their points early in a 33-0 win Saturday afternoon in a Mid-Atlantic Athletic Conference football game.

"We needed to get on track this week after getting beat by Urbana last week," Sidwell Friends coach John Simon said. "We put some new stuff in this week and it worked real good. We moved a couple of guys around and that really helped. We wanted to win this game, since it was a conference game."

Sidwell Friends (1-1, 1-0) had a big advantage in depth with 34 players on its roster. St. James (0-2, 0-1) had 22 players.

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Eight of the Saints' players started on both offense and defense.

"We didn't execute," St. James coach Daryl Hayes said. "We had a hard time pulling things together up front. We came out flat. We can't play like that against a team of that magnitude. We were just outclassed and outcoached. They are fundamentally sound, they run well and they block hard."

Senior running back Rhody Collins gained 88 yards on five carries and rushed for three touchdowns for Sidwell Friends.

"That was our game plan: to take control of the game in the first half," Simon said. "We should do pretty good in our league. We found the defense that we were looking for. We also made some changes there and they worked really good."

The Quakers got their offense started with their defense with 5:11 remaining in the first quarter when they recovered a fumble at the Saints' 11-yard line. On the next play, Collins scored on an 11-yard touchdown run.

With 33 seconds to go in the opening period, Nasser Muhammad threw a 9-yard touchdown pass to Andrew Fertig and ran for the two-point conversion for Sidwell Friends.

In the second quarter, Collins scored on a 56-yard touchdown run with 7:24 left and Muhammad returned a punt 39 yards for a touchdown with 4:55 remaining for the Quakers.

After St. James fumbled away the kickoff, Collins scored on a 4-yard touchdown run and Dekonti Sayeh kicked the extra point for Sidwell Friends with 1:21 to go in the first half to extend its lead to 33-0.

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