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Swampscott football routs AC, advances to Super Bowl

Tuesday, November, 27 By Mike Grenier
Staff writer

ARLINGTON | The misconception that football fans have about the spread offense is that a team is married to the passing game.

But coach Steve Dembowski's Swampscott High team isn't married to anything | except winning. The Big Blue are as resourceful as any team you'd care to name, as they demonstrated again last night against Arlington Catholic in the Division 3 playoffs.

On a night when the Cougars seemed determined to take away Swampscott quarterback Peter Kinchley and his vast assortment of passing weapons, the Big Blue got monumental performances from running backs Ilya Levin (13 carries, 144 yards, 2 touchdowns) and Kyle Shonio (9 carries, 98 yards, touchdown) and sauntered off with a richly-deserved 33-7 win.

Swampscott (11-1) now advances to the Division 3 Super Bowl against Medfield, a 12-8 winner over Abington, Saturday (time TBA) at Gillette Stadium in Foxboro.

"It's special," said Kinchley, who kept his poise, recovering from an 0 for 8 passing start to finish 6 for 16 for 84 yards, including a pivotal 33-yard Hail Mary touchdown to Justin Mitchell on the last play of the half for a 13-0 lead. "The whole season has been special, but to cap it off with a win like this and to go on (to Foxboro) | it's something we're going to remember for a very long time."

As it turned out in this matchup of spread offenses, Arlington Catholic was the team that was one dimensional. Swampscott's defense, which may be the most underrated part of this well-rounded team, snuffed out Arlington Catholic's running game, holding the Cougars to 36 yards. AC quarterback Corey Spencer was 15 for 28 for 185 yards through the air, but even that stat was deceptive. The Cougars didn't score until late in the game against Swampscott's second unit.

"Our defense," said Dembowski, "did a really fantastic job." The Cougars couldn't sustain anything on offense, and its defense was on the field so much that it eventually broke down. Swampscott scored 20 points in the fourth quarter to put it away. For the game, Swampscott piled up 288 ground yards.

"They made some really good adjustments," Arlington Catholic coach Serge Clivio said of Swampscott. "Our No. 1 concern was stopping their quick passing game. They like to dink you and dunk you (with short passes) and then they'll go over the top (for a long pass).

"But Swampscott changed up during the course of the game. They got the running game going, used the clock and reduced what we were able to do. We also made some stupid mistakes with penalties in the first half, but (Swampscott) did a really good job of limiting us."

It was thumps up for Swampscott from the time Levin netted 32 yards on his first carry of the game. The Big Blue's offensive line set the tone with its dominance, but it wasn't until the second quarter that Kinchley finished off a 7-play, 58-yard march with a 9-yard touchdown run that made it 6-0.

The sequence that gave Swampscott an even bigger lift came in the final two minutes of the half. Arlington Catholic was in the red zone and could've tied it or gone ahead, but the drive stalled with Spencer's fourth down incompletion at the Big Blue 11-yard line.

Would Swampscott be content with running out the final 1:53 of the half? Not a chance.

The Big Blue stayed in an aggressive mode and it paid off when Kinchley, who smartly slid on a running play and got the clock stopped with two seconds left in the half, tossed the Hail Mary pass to Mitchell, who caught the ball near the five and snaked his way into the end zone. Matt Barbuzzi kicked the extra point to make it 13-0 at the break.

"The last play of the half was a big play," said Clivio. "You can talk about the psychology of kids in a situation like that and how a play (hurts) a team. We had to regroup and get back into it by making plays in the second half, but we couldn't do it."

Mitchell felt he had to make the play, period.

"I saw the ball in the air and I just said to myself that I have to get it," said Mitchell, who led the Big Blue with 29 receptions in the regular season. "I came down with it and I was expecting to get hit, but there was no one there and I just walked into the end zone."

The entire second half for Swampscott was like the Red Sox having Jon Papelbon on the mound in the ninth inning. The Big Blue's defense controlled AC, and Swampscott's running game ruled the show.

Levin's 3-yard scoring run made it 20-0 with 9:10 left in the game, and Levin did it again less than five minutes later, capping an 11-play, 67-yard drive from four yards out for a 27-0 lead. The rest, as they say, was academic, although Shonio's 49-yard touchdown with just over a minute left was one of the prettiest runs of the night.

Dembowski didn't want to get too far ahead of himself in discussing the Super Bowl. He wanted his players to enjoy this one, at least for a little while.

"We're 3-0 in the semifinals," said Dembowski, referring to previous playoff games. "We'll take that."

Additional stories:

• Swampsott football notebook: Big pass before half sparks Big Blue