Glens Falls Chronicle Serving the Glens Falls/Lake George region; Warren, Washington and northern Saratoga counties since 1980
By Zander Frost, Chronicle Staff Writer
The Warrensburg-Lake George-North Warren Wolverines led 22-13 at halftime but ultimately lost, 41-22, to James O’Neill High in the Class C football semifinals Saturday in Middletown.
“Bittersweet,” Coach Mike Perrone told The Chronicle afterward. In their first season ever, the team finished 12-1.
“We’re starting to look at what we did. And overall we’re really proud, but it’s tough at the same time because, we’re not playing — we don’t have that opportunity to get to coach the seniors anymore.”
“We felt like we could certainly have won that game,” said Coach Perrone. “That’s what’s tough about it is we should have been up more at halftime. We were doing really, really well, and we had two fumbles in our first half.”
Particularly in the second half, he said, “we made a lot of mistakes…that we really haven’t made all year long. And when you’re playing a team that’s elite with that type of caliber of talent, you really can’t recover.”
How are the kids taking it?
“A lot of tears, obviously, right after the postgame,” Coach Perrone said. “I could just tell how much it meant to them, how much fun they had, how meaningful and impactful the season was.”
In a few months, weeks, and years, “we’ll be looking back and realizing all that we did, and be very fond and proud. And we’ve created some great memories.”
One of the graduating seniors Cooper Morehouse, the final North Warren player in the three-school merger.
Coach Perrone said Cooper, an offensive and defensive lineman, just started playing football his sophomore year — but will now play in college.
“I saw him play basketball. And I was like, dude, you need to play football. You’re a really good basketball player, but you could be a college level football player because of his athleticism, his size, his strength,” he said.
Coach Perrone chuckled that in Cooper’s first game, “there was a penalty called and he actually picked up the flag and handed it to the official. He didn’t even know.
“Today he has three colleges coming in to talk to him and a couple other kids about playing college football.”
While North Warren is ending its football participation, next year, Bolton Central School will join the Wolverines at the varsity level, bringing “about four or five kids…who played modified for us this year,” said Coach Perrone.
“Just like Cooper’s got an opportunity to play college level football…we want to make sure that these kids from Bolton have the same opportunity.”
Coach Perrone is excited for the future. “You could feel that buzz…You talk about being supported — you should have saw the stands at the game. Everybody’s just going nuts, three different communities really supporting us.
“I think that the kids that are young realize, hey, if we did this in our first year of our merger, how far can we go?
“And hopefully, that’s with a trip to the Dome [the state championship game at the Carrier Dome in Syracuse]. So we’re not going to rest till we get there.”
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