Sage can’t get much

NEWPORT COAST — Getting into the Sage Hill School football team’s backfield was easy enough Friday night for the visiting Rio Hondo Prep Kares.

Almost as easy as getting into the end zone.

Rio Hondo Prep scored five touchdowns in the first quarter and cruised, 53-0, in the nonleague game at Sage Hill.

The Lightning (1-2) could do little offensively in the first half, but it was special teams play that also hurt against Rio Hondo Prep (2-1), ranked No. 6 in the CIF Southern Section Northeast Division.

Rio Hondo junior Chris Llamas blocked a punt in the end zone and recovered to give his team the lead just more than two minutes into the game.

As the first quarter progressed, senior Tim Esguerra returned another punt 35 yards for a touchdown, while Esguerra and Antonio Alaniz ran for scores. Then, with three seconds left in the quarter, sophomore Charles Quintero returned another blocked punt 12 yards to up the advantage to 34-0.

With that, somebody at the scorer’s table brought up the idea of a running clock.

“The blocked punts set the tone early,” Sage Hill Coach Derek McIntyre said. “That was bad. We’ll have to go over the film and see what happened. They jumped on us early, and hey, that’s a great football team. We had opportunities, but we’ve got to believe in ourselves and step up and make plays. We had receivers dropping balls. We had a turnover. We had the couple of blocked punts. We’re a work in progress, but I believe in these guys.”

Rio Hondo put in reserves, but continued to move the ball, racking up 248 rushing yards.

Sage Hill, meanwhile, didn’t move the chains until its eighth possession of the first half. Quarterback Randall Mycorn finally found fellow sophomore Colton Gyulay on a seven-yard pass late in the first half.

Mycorn, who completed 13 of 25 passes for 80 yards, was sacked just twice. Still, the constant pressure from Rio Hondo Prep forced him to either get rid of the ball early or scramble. He ran the ball eight times for 29 yards, second on the team to senior Jelani Reynolds (59 yards), who was making his season debut.

“We had trouble getting it off, but it’s staying on blocks,” McIntyre said. “We talked about it all week; it’s not just the offensive line. It’s every guy staying on his block. I told them before the week, that one thing that Rio Hondo does is slip blocks very well.”

The lone big pass play came when Mycorn hit junior receiver Connor Gaughan on a 27-yard strike late in the third quarter. But that drive stalled after a high snap resulted in a 22-yard loss.

The Lightning had another second-half drive end when a receiver fumbled at the Rio Hondo Prep 30.

“We scouted this team a little,” said Rio Hondo sophomore running back Andrew Amundson, who ran for a game-high 64 yards and was one of three Kares with more than 50 yards rushing. “We knew how they were going to be, but we respected them and came in and played hard just like every game.”