Whatever nostalgia the Baldwinsville football team may have felt for the grass surface at Pelcher-Arcaro Stadium is getting outweighed by the success it is enjoying on the new surface it just put down.
In its second outing on this Field Turf, the Bees defeated Utica Proctor 41-28 Friday night as Jack Buis enjoyed a career-best performance against the Raiders, rushing for 254 yards on 24 carries and scoring four touchdowns, all of them in the first half.
It was the Class AA-2 division opener for both sides. B’ville was 1-1, but Proctor carried a 2-0 record into the game after non-league wins over Rome Free Academy and Central Square.
Any momentum the Raiders possessed went away the moment Buis went to work early in the first quarter, intercepting a Logan Wilcox pass and returning it 42 yards for the game’s first six points.
Minutes later, on the Bees’ first offensive possession, it quickly marched to the Raiders’ three, from where Buis scored again and Ben Dwyer added the extra point to make it 14-0.
From that point forward, the game turned into a chase, with Proctor constantly making up ground, only to have B’ville rebuild its cushion with a scoring march of its own.
Wilcox found Jamarious Morgan with a 29-yard TD pass late in the first quarter to get Proctor on the board, but B’ville made it 21-7 when Buis scored from 11 yards out before the period ended.
With B’ville’s offensive line pushing the Raiders back, Buis broke free for his fourth TD of the night on a 52-yard run in the second quarter. That, along with E.J. Edmonds’ 33-yard dash to the end zone, negated Morgan’s 21-yard scoring run and made it 34-13 at halftime.
Only in the third quarter did B’ville cool down, and Proctor did put together one scoring drive that Wilcox capped with a two-yard run. But in the final period, the Bees marched to the Raiders’ five and Dwyer capped the drive with a five-yard scoring pass to Gabe Horan.
On the defensive side, B’ville bent a bit, but managed to keep Proctor from big plays. Nick Cacciola had 12 tackles, four of them solo, and forced a fumble, while Buis picked up 10 tackles.
B’ville now gets its chance to avenge two straight Section III Class AA semifinal defeats to Liverpool when the rivals meet next Friday at 7 p.m. at LHS Stadium. The Warriors, who lost most of its starters from its 2015 sectional championship team, started 2-0 before getting shut out 34-0 by Cicero-North Syracuse.
