Vandals Open Season with 56-0 Rout

The 2016 Eureka County High football team is a young group after losing an abundance of leadership and skill from last years senior class. But that didn’t stop them from dominating Pyramid Lake in their season opener at home this past Friday night 56-0.

After watching his team play Friday, Eureka coach Fred Minoletti concluded, “We saw a lot of good, promising things from the Pyramid Lake game, but know we have a long way to go if we want to defend our division championship and get back to the playoffs.”

Some of the good Minoletti was talking about came from the quarterback position as junior signal caller CW Landrey posted 136 rushing yards and a total of four touchdowns.

Eureka also had a balanced rushing attack from three contributors against Pyramid Lake. Garrett Todd and Vinnie Padilla had 67 yards and one rushing touchdown each to help their squad in the ground attack. Mikey Lacovara was the third Vandal rusher with 71 yards and a score.

Most impressive is the goose egg in Pyramid Lake’s scoring column.

Minoletti was happy with the shutout as he mentioned, “Holding any team to zero points is tough to do in 8-man football, so we really like that the kids didn’t give up any big plays.”

Gavin Denshire led Eureka in tackles with 12 while CW Landrey had 10 tackles with 3.5 coming as tackles for loss. As a team defense, the Vandals caused and recovered two fumbles.

Eureka is 1-0 in its young season, but the coaching staff knows they can’t rely on one game to determine how their season will turn out.

“It is going to be a tight race in our division this year as we are expecting games to be close and decided in the 4th quarter,” Minoletti explained.

The Vandals will have another division game and a real test as they travel to the Nevada/California border to take on Coleville this Saturday.

Kickoff is at 1 p.m.