High school football: Elkton slips past Crow in defensive rematch

When Crow football head coach Nick Nevins took his team into the end zone at halftime of their home game against Elkton Friday, Oct. 9, and gathered them around a box of fruit snacks and Uncrustables, he was thinking of last year.

Last year, when the Cougars lost to the Elks 34-0 in this regular-season matchup, while Nevins watched the game on a stream from his son’s Marine boot camp graduation.  

Last year, when they trailed Elkton in their rematch in the OSAA playoff semifinal 6-0 at halftime, then came back in a stunning 45-39 victory.

This year, Crow trailed 12-7 at the half Friday night, and Nevins was done thinking about last year.

The football was messy madness, and yet the Cougars’ first-half touchdown came from someone without the specter of last year on his muddy shoulder pads: freshman Blake Furness, who took a handoff wide and eluded trailing would-be tacklers down the right sideline for a 43-yard score.

A half-dozen fumbles, mostly on bad snaps, put both sides in position to capitalize, but then they couldn’t, over and over. 

This isn’t last year, Nevins believes — and it wasn’t, both because the Cougars were competitive, and because they couldn’t mount a comeback in the eventual 19-7 loss. A rare low-scoring six-man game meant progress.

“I can see the growth,” Nevins said. “For losing the production we did last year, and to be playing a team of [Elkton’s] caliber to a, let’s be real, a 12-point game…there’s definitely growth. There’s silver linings to everything. We just didn’t come out on top.”

A bit of history 

Even as Nevins tries to move past it, a history lesson here is necessary. Elkton (6-0, 3-0) has been a recent dominant power in 1A six-man football. Crow (2-3, 1-2) has not been. Nevins’ program entered its 2025 regular season matchup with Elkton at 2-2, on the back of a two-game losing streak. Nevins watched from a distance as the Elks pieced apart his team.

That game, he said, became their inspiration for a miraculous comeback. Crow rattled off three straight wins, qualified for the playoffs and won three more games — including the playoff game against Elkton — before falling decisively in the championship to Harper Charter.

Then, the mantra was “Why not us?” Then, Nevins said, nobody looked at them as a serious contender. 

This year, he asked his team to become the shark. Their powder-blue and red uniforms, however muddied, kept rising from the turf Friday as they chased a win which would solidify that tag. 

Furness’ first half touchdown was sandwiched between a pair of Elkton scores. One, a third-and-goal punch-in which capped a long drive, preceded Furness’ breakaway. The next mirrored the Cougars’ effort: a 52-yard can’t-catch-him track meet.

“We’ve been trying to take it easy on [Blake],” Nevins said. “But at the end of the day, the talent is there. He’s got the speed, he’s got the quickness, and he’s really becoming and growing into the player we hoped he would be at the end of the season, and it’s maybe happening even a little faster than I thought it might.”

As far as the “ghost” — Nevins’ words — of last year, it doesn’t haunt the freshman. Nevins sees two sides of that. 

“I think there’s good and bad,” the coach said. “Obviously, the good is that he’s writing his own chapter. The bad is that there’s a lot of learning that came out of last year, too — learning that we can win, and learning how to win.”

‘Ready to go back in’

In the third quarter, Aiden DeLeon, a sophomore who grew into one of Nevins’ top options last year during the Cougars’ run — in part because he has valuable experience playing pre-high school football — felt the thud of an Elkton player’s pads, then skidded through the huddled Crow sideline before coming to a rest.

He lay there for a while, then rose to tell Nevins that he was “ready to go back in, coach.” 

Last year, when the Cougars played Falls City, they lost so many players to injury that they played the second half with five. This year, DeLeon had teammates to spell him while he caught his breath.

“Going from having no numbers pretty much at all [and] barely having a team for the season to having 14 kids on the team, it’s just a huge difference,” quarterback Michael Parker said. “But we still have that same mentality of, ‘We can’t quit. We are not allowed to quit.’”

Two plays later, DeLeon jumped a receiver’s route to pick off the Elkton quarterback and set the Cougars up with a chance.

But this wasn’t last year, because there would be no comeback. DeLeon’s interception instead was scattered in a mess of second-half fumbles and turnovers on downs and ended up lost when the Elks snatched a first down as the clock wound under a minute. Every effort — a mad Parker scramble, or one of defensive lineman Peyton Rinkle’s several sacks — fell short. 

Nevins gathered his team after the clock expired and laid out the tightrope he’s been trying to walk for the last few weeks. Yes, this looks like last year, he admitted. No, we don’t want to be last year’s team.

“I think there’s a lot of times that we’ve talked about last year,” Nevins said. “And then we tell the kids, ‘You haven’t earned anything yet. This isn’t last year’s team.’”

Last year, the Cougars were shut out in this game. This isn’t last year, Nevins said, even though they have the same record exiting this game as they did in 2025. This isn’t last year, they believe, despite another game against Gilchrist next week following their Elkton matchup. This isn’t last year because they know how to win, even if it didn’t happen Friday night. The weight is expectation now, not trepidation, and they can be perched on their helmets and feel disappointed afterward because they know what’s possible.

“I don’t want to keep bringing up last year, but there’s lessons that can still be learned,” Nevins said. “I don’t want a loss tonight to shut down their confidence, because we have the experience of doing it last year. I want them to know anything is still possible.”

“After losing a few of our best dudes, things took a little bit of a loss,” DeLeon said. “But we’re here now, and I think we’re way better than we were last year. We have so much potential, and we can get out there and do even more than we did last year.”

This year, there was no miracle at Crow — just a 12-point football game. 

This year, that’s all they needed.

Scoreboard

Thursday, Oct. 8

• Springfield 35, La Salle Prep 0

Friday, Oct. 9

• Triangle Lake 52, Eddyville Charter 32
• Willamette 54, South Medford 0
• Sheldon 40, Clackamas 0
• Thurston 52, Eagle Point 0
• Crater 59, North Eugene 13
• Churchill 30, Roseburg 22
• Marist Catholic 63, Cottage Grove 0
• Junction City 24, North Bend 15
• Klamath Union 69, Elmira 7
• Creswell 26, Sisters 21
• Pleasant Hill 28, Madras 18
• Lowell 54, Monroe-Alsea 14
• Waldport 56, Oakridge 18
• Perrydale 44, Mohawk 26 
• Elkton 19, Crow 7