For a little while on Friday, the Hernando High flag football team made what seemed highly unlikely feel quite possible.
The Leopards were making their first-ever trip to the Final Four, facing Robinson in a Class 2A state semifinal at the AdventHealth Training Center that serves as the indoor practice facility for the Buccaneers in Tampa.
It was a tough draw, to say the least, for Hernando. The Knights, playing just a few minutes away from their campus, were not only the No. 1-ranked team in 2A but also eight-time defending state champions, with nine titles in the past 10 seasons, not counting the 2020 campaign cut short by COVID-19.
In the end, Robinson pulled away for a 34-12 victory and went on to win its ninth straight state crown on Saturday with a 41-0 win over Choctawhatchee. Yet the Leopards represented themselves well.
“We went into halftime down 13-6, which is where we want to be,” Hernando head coach Tyson Ellis said. “We’re close to them, we’re hanging in there. Just keep it close, we just need to get it going.
“They had the first possession of the second half and we needed to stop them. They went down the field and scored again. We couldn’t stop them. They’re a very good football team. They’re well-coached, they do what they do well. We just didn’t consistently do what we needed to do to win this game today.”
No one likely gave much chance to Hernando (15-4), a program in just its third season of existence. Robinson (18-3) hadn’t even given up a point in over a month. That changed on the game-opening drive on Friday, when the Leopards scored on a 1-yard pass from Carlie Grant to Annabelle Chamberlain.
“I think it was a positive vibe through the team,” Ellis said. “We can hang with these girls, we can play with these girls. They can be scored on. They’re not the team that everybody makes them out to be, they’re just unstoppable. I think it was good for our mindset early in the game. I think we held on to that until halftime and then after halftime, just a few things here and there, not executing offensively. We had some missed passes and dropped passes and stuff like that. You can’t hang with a team like that if you don’t score with them. And we just didn’t score with them today.”
Aajyrah Adams intercepted a pass in the end zone to end Robinson’s first drive, but Hernando failed to capitalize.
“We started off well,” Ellis said. “We took the ball down the field. We controlled it. We scored first, which was what we wanted to do.
“… We stopped them and had the ball back, and had an opportunity to go up again two scores. But we didn’t move the ball very well the second time we had possession.”
The Knights scored 34 unanswered points before Grant hit Adams on a long touchdown pass on the final play of the game.
“To come to the Final Four with such a young team, we’re only losing two seniors,” Ellis said. “These girls know that we can do this again, we can come back. I think that next year will be a little different if we can get back to this game.
“The experience being here, being under the pressure, being in that atmosphere, I think it’s huge for the girls moving forward with this program. Very positive, I’m very proud of all of them, how they played, how they did this season. I think we exceeded all expectations. But next year, I think our expectation is to get to the state title game.”
In other spring sports postseason action, the seventh-seeded Springstead softball team traveled across the state to take on second-seeded Deltona in a Region 5A-2 quarterfinal last Thursday and pulled out a thrilling 1-0 win in nine innings.
Rachel Rivera went 2 for 5 with a stolen base and the game-winning RBI on a single to score the automatic runner who began the inning on second base for the Eagles (15-8). Alivia Miller gave up just one hit and struck out 17 in a complete game.
“It was touch and go the entire game,” Springstead head coach Craig Swartout said. “We had some base runners, but we weren’t able to move them around. As the game went on, it was kind of strange because Alivia was getting stronger and stronger the later the game went. In the extra innings, she just shut it down. They didn’t really have a chance.”
