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EAST HARTFORD —Bloomfield has plenty of tournament pedigree in football with CIAC state championships. But in recent years, the Warhawks have come up short in the Class S finals.
That wasn’t the case on Saturday at Rentschler Field; the Warhawks were not going to be denied this time.
No. 2 seed Bloomfield scored 22 unanswered points in the second half to pull away from No. 4 Cromwell/Portland 42-20 to win the CIAC Class S state championship.
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“Any time you win a state championship, it becomes No. 1,” Bloomfield coach Ty Outlaw said. “This is No. 1 today. Yesterday was yesterday, today is today.”
This was the fifth consecutive Class S final Bloomfield (11-1) played in. The Warhawks defeated Haddam-Killingworth in the 2018 final, then lost to Sheehan-Wallingford in 2019, Cromwell/Portland in 2021 and Ansonia last season. It’s Outlaw’s third title as a head coach.
“I felt like the (Boston) Red Sox whey they were cursed because I felt like I was getting cursed,” Outlaw said of the recent stretch of losses.
It is the 10th championship overall for the Warhawks program. Davion Kerr called it the “Revenge Tour,” referring back to that 21-6 loss to Cromwell/Portland two years ago.
“I knew they were going to punch us in the mouth first. I told my team, ‘We fight together, we are going to win this game together,” said Davien Kerr, Davion’s twin brother. “All we gotta get was two stops, two stops would change the whole game. We did not fall down. We came back up as a team and we won the game.”
Davion Kerr rushed for 173 yards and a touchdown on 21 carries and also caught a touchdown. Davien Kerr caught five passes for 89 yards and two touchdowns and also rushed for one.
Osi Yearwood tied the game at 20-all on the third play of the second half for Cromwell/Portland (10-3) on a 2-yard run.
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Davion Kerr then scored on Bloomfield’s second play from scrimmage on a 22-yard run. The two-point conversion made it 28-20.
“Bloomfield is a great team, a tough team, very, very tough,” Cromwell/Portland coach Randell Bennett said. “They have more guns than we do, more horses than we do, just better players.”
It was the final minute of the first half that had a pretty big impact on the game’s outcome.
Cromwell/Portland went for it on 4th and 5 from its own 35-yard line. Quarterback Jess Elfreich lofted a pass for Jack Nolan down the right sideline. Nolan caught it for a 50-yard completion down to the Bloomfield 15. On the next play, Elfreich hit Nolan for the touchdown.
But on the play, Elfreich (11 for 17, 129 yards) took a hard hit after throwing the pass. He didn’t return to the game.
“They (the officials) weren’t calling late hits, I guess,” Bennett said. “He got hit late, then he got a concussion and he couldn’t play (in the second half).”
A good punt return gave Bloomfield the ball at the Cromwell/Portland 33. In the final seconds, Bloomfield quarterback Darrien Foster (10 of 17, 167 yards, two touchdowns) hit Davin Kerr for a 32-yard pass down to the 3.
Bloomfield, which was out of timeouts, hustled to the line and Foster downed it with what looked to be a little less than a second on the game clock. Then a pass interference call in the end zone gave Bloomfield an untimed down.
Davien Kerr scored his third touchdown on a 1-yard run on the next play, a 1-yard run, giving the Warhawks a 20-14 halftime lead.
“Talk about the fact that they clocked under 2 seconds (left). You can’t clock it under 2 seconds,” Bennett said. “They also called the pass interference down there on our guy, it’s at the 1, he didn’t move off the goal line. I don’t know, It just seemed like they (the officials) were giving them every chance to score right there. We couldn’t hold up to that kind of game I guess that they were calling.”
Bloomfield put the game away with a 12-play scoring drive in the third quarter,capped when Zachal Kilber recovered Davion Kerr’s fumble in the end zone.
Player of the game
Davien Kerr, Bloomfield: Caught five balls for 89 yards for two touchdowns and added a 1-yard TD run on the final play of the first half to give Bloomfield the halftime lead.
Quotable
“They just have to take a deep breath and just do their jobs and I think they did well in he second half,” — Bloomfield coach Ty Outlaw
Bloomfield 42, Cromwell/Portland 20