Friday, September 13 The Galena Pirate Football team played the Forreston Cardinals. The Pirates played a hard, long, and close game. Gus Nack 26’ had 16 tackles throughout the game, 7 solo and 9 assisted. “We know that as a team, we can’t give up,” said Nack. “We have to play until the end, and that’s what we did in this game.”
Zach Heller 25’ had 10 tackles, 4 solo and 6 assisted. Roman Romer ’26 and Juan Dorantos ’26 both with 10 tackles. Myles Schumacher ’25 with 140 rushing yards, 64 receiving yards, 4 tackles and 1 sack.
The first quarter was an interesting part of the game, neither Forreston nor Galena scored. The second quarter started off the scoring, Forrestons player Brady Gill got the first touchdown of the night.
In the third quarter, the Pirates started to get aggressive, they were losing due to the Cardinals getting another touchdown, bringing the score to 12-0. With 1:54 seconds left in the third quarter, Schumacher scored the first Galena touchdown of the night, running 16 yards. “It’s really exciting to score a touchdown,” said Schumacher, “but this touchdown changed the way the game was going”. With the Galena touchdown, the score was now 12-7 Forreston.
In the fourth quarter, Galena started with a touchdown by Romer. “It was a great feeling to get into the end zone,” Romer said. “Especially knowing we were in crunch time and needed one.”
The touchdown made Galena up by 1 point until Gill got another touchdown for Forreston. The Pirates didn’t think they had a chance to score again, ”The game was already hard as it was,” said Mason Smith ‘26. “With less than 3 minutes left, we were down by 5 points.”
A long 40-yard pass to Schumacher from Romer got the Pirates a touchdown with only 2:28 seconds left in the game. “I have a lot of trust in him to make that catch and do what he does best once he gets into space,” Romer explained. “I knew that all I had to do was get the ball in his hands and let him do the rest going 40 yards putting us up with 2 minutes left.”
The buzzer went off and the Pirates took the win. Roman stated “Week one was honestly a rude awakening losing to EPC. Once we got back to practice the next week we knew we needed a win before we went into Forreston. So getting the win over Morrison gave us all the confidence and motivation we needed. And Ultimately we got a much-needed win over a great team.”
