2 Pretzels rush for 100 yards, but Freeport falls to Woodstock North in the football playoffs

This was 16 years in the making, so Freeport wasn’t about to disappear easily. After two touchdowns, the Pretzels pulled within two points and began a heavy pass rush on third and long.

Woodstock North quarterback Parker Halihan threw a desperate, wobbly screen pass to Max Dennison just as he was about to be hit by several Pretzels. That set up another TD in Saturday’s 34-24 win over Woodstock North in the first round of the Class 5A playoffs.

“We weren’t ready for it, I guess,” said Freeport star senior running back/safety Cam Verner. “It turned the game back on them.”

The play, Halihan’s only completion of the game, went 34 yards.

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“At that point I wasn’t that angry,” Freeport junior linebacker Ben Summers said. “It was a broken game; what can we do about it? But looking back, it was a big turning point in the game. If we could have prevented that, it would have been huge.”

Woodstock North (8-2) took an early 14-0 lead. Freeport, making its first playoff appearance in 16 years, didn’t have a first down on its first two drives. When it finally got a first down on its third drive, it threw an interception three plays later.

But a 70-yard pass from Payton Woker to Jaelin Campbell set up a 1-yard run by Verner with 52 seconds left in the half to cut the deficit to 14-6.

And the Pretzels (5-5) then put together one-play TD drives on a 65-yard run by Denarius Epps and a 48-yard run by Verner around that Woodstock North drive kept alive by Halihan’s desperation pass .

“We stuck with what we know and what we do,” said Verner, who ran for 117 yards and two touchdowns on 20 carries. “We have not stopped. We just kept going.”

But after that pass, the Pretzels couldn’t stop Woodstock North. After stopping the Thunder on three straight drives, Woodstock North then scored on three straight drives, starting with a TD four plays after that screen pass, to beat Freeport.

David Randecker in particular took over late, finishing with 221 yards rushing on 30 carries after Freeport seemingly got his number, holding him to 40 yards rushing on one stretch of 12 carries. But he then went for 101 yards on his last six rushes.

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Still, the Pretzels were encouraged by their performance in front of an estimated 600 fans who drove two hours from Freeport to fill the visitors’ stands.

“This meant a lot,” said Epps, a junior who ran for 100 yards on 10 carries and caught three passes for 22 yards. “We did something that hasn’t been done since I was born. We proved that Freeport can make the playoffs. We are not a team to be overlooked.

“The plan is to move forward now. We are not satisfied if we only reach the play-offs next year.”

“This has been a really big year for us,” Summers added. “It showed us what we can do when we play as a team. And we can do more than this. This showed what we can do and what we can build on next year.”

Matt Trowbridge is a sports reporter for the Rockford Register Star. Email him at [email protected]. Follow him on X, formerly Twitter, at @MattTrowbridge.

This article originally appeared on Rockford Register Star: Cam Verner, Denarius Epps run for 100 yards in Freeport’s 34-24 loss