THE OFFICIAL SITE OF
Enumclaw High School Athletics

NOBLE — Monday morning in Noble High School’s halls, Danny Arebalo’s going to be treated like a hero and why not? All the Bear running back did Friday night against Newcastle was run for 225 yards, catch for 38 and score three touchdowns. Player of the game. No doubt. Also, Luke Graham caught a two passes for 18 yards, neither of them particularly memorable. And yet, without him, there’s a decent chance the Bears lose. Instead, they won 35-21. The first question asked Graham after the game was if he knew why somebody wanted to talk to him. “The onside.” he said. Right. Though Noble had run off 27 straight points to lead 28-14, Newcastle quarterback Casey Thompson found Jacob Morris over the middle for a late-in-the-fourth-quarter 38-yard score to make it a one-possession game and here came the onside kick. The ball took a garden hop allowing three Racers to leap for it and the only Bear in the zip code was Graham. He went up and put his hands on it first about a tenth of a second before six Newcastle hands tried to take it away. Grabbed about nine feet in the air, who the pigskin belonged to would be decided at the bottom of the pile. Every Racer on the field pointed one way. The referee pointed the other. A few plays later, Arebalo was in for his final score. Game over. “All I remember is grabbing the ball and praying that I held on to it,” Graham said. “I was holding on as hard as I could.” The final score made it look like Noble won comfortably, yet not only did the Bears need Graham to grab the last Racer kick, but they had to rally fiercely from an early deficit. Newcastle led 14-0 in the first quarter, and actually overcame a fourth-and-9 from its own 22 and a first-and-41on the same drive to score its second touchdown, a 7-yard run from Thomas Donahue. And, after Arebalo fumbled the ball away at the Bear 28 early in the second quarter, it looked like Noble would soon be down three touchdowns. Instead, Newcastle gave the ball back on downs and the game turned fast. “We settled down,” Noble coach Greg George said. Hayden Lingle found Isaiah Willhoite for a 3-yard score. And after a four-and-out Racer possession, one of the craziest touchdowns anybody’s ever seen happened, when Arebalo fumbled again, yet offensive lineman Logan Tougas picked it up and peeled about 5 yards into the end zone, tying the game. Each of Arebalo’s TDs came after the half on an 8-yard run, a 12-yard reception and the one that put it away for good, a 12-yard run. The difference in the game for him were his fumbles. “They definitely got my head straight,” he said. “They made me realize I have to quit making mistakes.” Thompson ran for 170 yards on 22 carries and threw for 205, yet completed just 14 of 33 and was picked off twice, once each by Ethan Wallace and Chance Felchlin. Hingle completed 12 of 21 tosses for 138 yards. Cooper Barnes ran 10 times for 74 yards. The Bears finished with 446 yards of offense to the Racers’ 409. Mostly, they won. From down early and rallying, to getting a huge play from Graham that won't show up in any boxscore. “Luke’s got a knack for making plays like that,” George said. That was against Coweta, last season, when Graham recovered a Bear onside kick. Noble won that game, too.

THE OFFICIAL SITE OF
Enumclaw High School Athletics

NOBLE COMES ROARING BACK TO BEAT NEWCASTLE

CLAY HORNING

Norman Transcript | 9/1/2017

PHOTO CREDIT: Noble Athletics