Meadowdale junior Dominick Ramsey, junior Courtney Russell and senior Daelon Philpot all rushed for scores as the Lions improved to 7-3 and finished a perfect 4-0 in the City League.
“It’s awesome,” said Meadowdale coach Elliott Dangerfield, Sr. “I’m at a loss for words. Twenty-five years is a long time for everything that this program has been through, the ups, the downs, a lot of downs, but they fought. I think we were picked to be third in the league this year at 3-7 and we’re 7-3 with a good chance to make the playoffs next week. It means a lot to this program — city champs and playoffs, that hasn’t been done here in a long time.”
A year after going 1-9, Belmont finished the season 4-6 and nearly earned a share of the league title.
“(Meadowdale) played a great game,” said Belmont coach Marcus Vaughn. “They saw it through. My guys proved to me that they belonged. Coming from last year we had a situation where we had a lot of doubt. We won one game, most games were running clocks and we probably gave up the most points in the state … to this year where guys have grown up a little bit. Our guys are still young, they’re still babies. People are going to have to know we’re on their schedule. They’re going to have to plan to beat us and I can be there. We’ve got to get more consistent, we’ve got to make sure that we grow in the weight room, grow with the game of football and we look to be back next year.”
With about six minutes remaining in the first half, Belmont downed a punt at the Meadowdale 5-yard line. On the next play, the Lions snapped the ball out of the back of the end zone to give the Bison a 2-0 halftime lead.
“I was very thrilled because we gave up 42 points six days ago (against Dunbar),” Vaughn said. “For us to hold them to 22, we know that they’re a high-scoring team, I felt like our defense played well. I think where we can grow is taking advantage of opportunities. We had a lot of first-year seniors and a lot of first-year players in general. The game of football is new to them. My plan is to teach them more football, get them around football so that some of the plays we missed out on and some of the mistakes we made, we can grow from them.”
Early in the third quarter, Belmont was called for a penalty in their own end zone, which resulted in a safety for Meadowdale, tying the score.
With seven seconds remaining in the third quarter, Ramsey scored on a 34-yard run to give the Lions an 8-2 lead.
“Our defense came out smoking,” Dangerfield, Sr. said, “but our offense didn’t have a great practice and we told them that stuff can translate over. At halftime, the coaches had a good game plan. We knew we could do what we had to do to score, we just had to put it all together.”
Russell scored on a 4-yard run to extend the lead to 14-2 and Meadowdale junior quarterback Jordan Brown ran in the 2-point conversion to make it 16-2. A few minutes later, Philpot sealed the Lions Senior Night victory, scoring on a 27-yard reverse to make it 22-2.
“It’s got to be a great feeling (for Philpot),” Dangerfield said. “We purposely went to it. We tried to go to it earlier in the game and we had a (penalty) on the first play of the game. We knew we were going to come back to it because it was open. We wanted to get (Philpot) out of here on the right note.”
With about three minutes remaining, a small fight broke out between the teams and the game was called by officials.
The win puts the Lions in a great position to qualify for the playoffs for the first time in school history. Meadowdale played in a playoff game in 2020 when all teams advanced to the postseason due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Lions are currently ranked No. 14 in Division III, Region 12, according to unofficial playoff rankings posted by JoeEitel.com. They’ll have to wait until the rest of the Week 10 games are completed to find out their playoff fate.
Until then, they’ll have plenty of time to celebrate like it’s 1999 — the last time they brought the City League trophy back to Meadowdale.
“I’m ecstatic,” Dangerfield said. “These kids deserve it. They bought in in the summer and kept playing and kept playing. Our word for the whole year was ‘Finish,’ every game we just kept finishing and that’s what they did. They finished this game, even though it got cut short with some nonsense, but at the end of the day, both sides played a great and awesome game.”
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