By DAVE O’SULLIVAN
Staff Writer
On X @GDsullysays
OCEAN CITY — Last November, Northern Highlands came within three points of winning a sectional championship, losing 13-11 to Phillipsburg in the North Jersey, Section 2 title game. The Highlanders returned their quarterback and leading rusher, as well as senior Carter Blattner — a 6-foot-5, 260-pound, three-star lineman who has scholarship offers from the likes of Wisconsin, Southern California, Pitt, Rutgers and Boston College, according to 247sports.com.
Quite the challenge for a Holy Spirit team that never ducks a big game and always likes to play tough competition in the season opener.
The Spartans got all they wanted, and then some, as the Highlanders got a pair of touchdowns from senior running back Chase Calarco and pounded the ball 30 times for nearly 200 yards in a 27-12 victory over Holy Spirit at the annual Battle at the Beach at Ocean City’s Carey Stadium. Senior Quarterback Jack O’Callaghan misfired on just four passing attempts, going 12-of-16 for 205 yards and a pair of touchdowns.
As well as everything went for Highlands, the opposite was true for Holy Spirit, which had several drives stall due to penalties and came up with nothing on a first-and-goal situation late in the third quarter after the Highlanders took a 21-6 lead.
“There’s a lot of things we can learn from. We did a lot of things to shoot ourselves in the foot. We had a lot of penalties; we had some drives where we went from second-and-5 to second-and-15 with some penalties. So it’s just stuff we have to clean up with ourselves,” said Spartans head coach Andrew DiPasquale. “Northern Highlands played a really good game. That’s a good football team. But just stuff we have to clean up and hopefully it’s just some first-game type of flags and things like that we can get cleaned up going into next week.”
Next week, Spirit travels to Oakcrest, which lost 32-0 to Ocean City in the game right after Spirit-Highlands. DiPasquale is hoping his team can put together more drives like the one it did to close out the game, as senior quarterback Ty Costabile connected with 6-foot-5 senior wideout Jordan Gonzalez on an 8-yard scoring strike.
“I thought Ty was great today, he did everything we asked him to do. At the end of the day, he just has to do his job, and that’s what he did. We’re going to look for him to be a leader, starting tomorrow morning at practice and getting us going in the right direction for next week,” DiPasquale said. “This is our fifth year playing at the Battle at the Beach and we’ve been on every end of the spectrum that you can possibly be on — losing by a lot, winning by a good amount, buzzer-beaters. We tell the kids all the time, ‘how do you respond?’ And that’s going to be our message to them tomorrow morning, ‘how do you respond?’ You can’t dwell on this stuff too long, you have to have a short-term memory and get back to work.”
Northern Highlands jumped out to a 14-0 lead on a 33-yard touchdown pass from O’Callaghan to Doyle Flatt in the first quarter and a Calarco 4-yard run in the second quarter, but Spirit shaved the deficit to 14-6 before halftime on a 26-yard scoring strike from Costabile to Mainland Regional transfer Dylan Granzow.
But the Highlanders made a comeback difficult when O’Callaghan found Drew Vandersnow for a 35-yard screen pass touchdown that put Northern Highlands up, 21-6, with 5:43 left in the third quarter.
“We always want to challenge ourselves,” DiPasquale said. “You want to play against a good football team, and they certainly were that. They are big up front and that running back (Calarco) is a good player. But that’s what you want to do, you want to challenge yourself, see where you stand and go from there. We know we have to make some adjustments and fix some things.”
WHAT’S NEXT: Holy Spirit travels to Oakcrest on Sept. 5 at 6 p.m. Northern Highlands travels to Wayne Valley on Sept. 5 at 6:30 p.m.
