AITKIN — The Ely Timberwolves suffered an inglorious end to their football season on Tuesday, as the 7AA Aitkin Gobblers steamrolled their way to 63 first-half points in a 63-6 sectional playoff win at Aitkin.
Cooperative agreements with Northeast Range and Vermilion Country School gave Ely the players it needed to field a football team this year, but the collaboration came with a built-in season-ending penalty. While seven of Ely’s eight regular-season games were played against Class A teams, the schools’ combined enrollment pushed them into Class AA for postseason play. A 59-8 drubbing at Class AA International Falls in September foreshadowed the disadvantage the Wolves would face in the playoffs.
The mismatch on paper was stark. Aitkin’s 55-man roster was more than double the size of Ely’s, and the Gobblers’ 12 senior and 12 juniors outnumbered the entire Wolves’ roster. Aitkin came into the game on a five-game winning streak and a 7-1 record, while Ely stood at 2-6 and was smarting from a 52-14 loss to 7A perennial powerhouse Braham the week before.
And the game played out as one might expect. The Gobblers scored at will on the ground, through the air, and on defense with a pick-six. Ely’s defense was susceptible to big plays, as they gave up touchdown runs of 43 and 50 yards in Aitkin’s devastating 35-point first quarter and a 56-yard passing score in the second.
Of little consolation is that the Wolves won the second half playing against the Aitkin second string, with quarterback D.J. Johnson rushing for the only touchdown of the half.
Johnson was the Wolves’ leading rusher with 60 yards, while Kasen Dostert rushed for 21 and Kooper Dostert and Sean Merriman each had 20. Merriman led the defense with five tackles, and Leo Mcrahl, Oscar Shock, and Kooper Dostert all tallied three takedowns.
“I don’t think we came out and played our best football right away,” Ely Head Coach Louie Gerzin said. “I was pleased with our second half effort. We got a lot of young guys in the game, and they played really hard. But the first half wasn’t our best, and that was frustrating.”
Coming off a pair of 1-8 campaigns, Gerzin installed new offensive and defensive schemes this season, and he said it took a few games for the team to get comfortable with those. It didn’t help that the Wolves’ first five games were against historically strong Barnum, I-Falls, Mt. Iron-Buhl (forfeit due to injuries), Cherry, and Deer River, but by the Cherry game there were signs the team was coming along. When the homecoming contest against Chisholm rolled around, the Wolves put all the pieces together in a solid 32-20 win and followed that with a big 58-40 victory over East Central.
“Week four or five was kind of when we started to hit our stride. We started to really understand the game from our new systems standpoint,” Gerzin said. “So, then we were able to play faster with more confidence, more speed, and more strength. We finished with Braham and Aitkin and we played hard, but we were just outgunned. But we got better as the season went along, that’s for sure.”
The Wolves finished their season with a record of 2-7.