(Chris Detrick | The Salt Lake Tribune) Fremont's Jay Scott (5) runs past Weber's Jace Campbell (48) during the game at Fremont High School Thursday, October 5, 2017.
Plain City • Weber hasn’t been in a position to contend for region championships very much over the last two decades.
It showed a little bit Thursday.
But the important thing for the Warriors was that past frustrations didn’t impinge upon current-day success on this night.
Weber held a three-touchdown lead at Fremont before the Silverwolves trimmed the deficit to a one score. But the Warriors held on for a 28-20 victory to wrap up the Region 1 football crown.
“To our kids’ credit, they continued to fight, continued to battle and made plays we needed to make to win games,” Weber coach Matt Hammer said. “That hasn’t happened here.”
Weber (7-1, 5-0) opened a two-game lead over second-place Fremont (5-3, 3-2) with one regular-season contest left for both teams. The Warriors’ last region title came in 1996 when it shared a championship with Clearfield and Davis.
WEBER 28, FREMONT 20 <br>• Hudson Schenck grabs three touchdown passes from quarterback Austin Bartholomew to help Weber built a 28-7 lead.<br>• Jay Scott runs for 93 yards for Fremont, and his 2-yard TD in the fourth quarter cuts his team’s deficit to eight points. <br>• Weber senior Ty Barnett picks off two Silverwolves passes in the last four minutes to clinch the win.
That’s even a longer stretch than the last time Weber won a state crown.
“They won a state championship in 1999, but they went in as a three seed,” Hammer said.
Quarterback Austin Bartholomew threw for 169 yards and ran for 55, and it was receiver Hudson Schenck who was a primary scoring threat for the visitors.
Schenck caught three touchdowns, with the first a 4-yard grab on the heels of a 75-yard throw from Bartholomew to Braedon Iverson in the first quarter.
That TD drive answered the opening one for Fremont — a quick 80-yard march that culminated in a 27-yard scoring pass from Dawson Sanford to Griffin Rhees.
The biggest Bartholomew-to-Schenck connection was a 19-yard strike with 7 minutes, 49 seconds left in the second quarter to put Weber up 14-7. That touchdown pass came on fourth-and-5.
“Our coaches designed a couple of plays to make the safeties bite,” said Schenck, who also grabbed a 38-yard TD pass form Bartholomew midway through the fourth quarter for a 28-7 lead. “Bart just threw it on the money.”
That three-touchdown lead quickly was whittled down to one.
A 38-yard strike from Sanford to Chaedon Dayton made it 28-14 about midway through the fourth quarter.
When Weber was forced three-and-out on its next possession, its punt was blocked by Calvin Peterson. Fremont got the ball at the Warriors’ 5 and converted on a 2-yard TD run by Jay Scott.
The star of the waning moments of the game turned out to be Weber senior wide receiver Ty Barnett, who missed one chance to keep Fremont’s offense off the field when he dropped a long pass with just more than four minutes left.
Barnett made amends on defense.
He snared two interceptions from his defensive back position to end the last two Silverwolves possessions.
“It just hit me in the hands and fell out, and I was, like, ‘Crap,’” Barnett said about his drop on offense. “I just had to flush it away and come back. I was, like, ‘I can’t mess up again.’”