Come Back Game Against Skyridge 

Written by: Lia Reid

Contributors: Layla Thompsom and Pierce Lepisi

To kickoff our school’s football season, Liberty played Skyridge, Utah losing 26 to 41. Skyridge’s defense seemed to have done their homework on our offense, which features the two of the three people we interviewed, Ezra Sanelivi and Elijah Espinoza. Liberty’s defense (features our third person of interest; Jeremiah Loane) held up a strong fight until third quarter when an unfortunate turnover of the ball which led to Skyridge’s victory. 

(Photo Credit to @azn.productions on instagram)

Ezra Sanelivi is the offensive RB, he was also marked as one of the players of this game by maxpreps. Ezra was asked how he individually adapted to the defense from Skyridge and he felt that he adapted by “just staying patient” but, besides his individual play, he was asked the question of what he felt Liberty’s offense in this game could have done differently and he stated “take the little things seriously and was just to limit our simple mistakes because honestly I think that we couldn’t get anything going because the minor mistakes we made really killed us”. Another offensive teammate Ezra has is Elijah Espinoza who is the QB. Individually Elijah stated that as he was reading Skyridge’s defense he observed “they have a lot of tells and they had a different formation you often don’t see on a defense”, which may be a reason for the hiccups within this game. Elijah also felt that as a group offense had some struggles but specifically him he” Turned the ball over in the red zone which is you know you can never do that. I need to never turn the ball over again, and I think as an offense I will start clicking better and start getting better and get used to each other”. Based off both Ezra and Elijah responses we can hope offense as a whole can all use this game as a learning lesson to adapt and maybe change some mistakes. We can be sure to watch both Ezra and Elijah out on the field this season correcting their mistakes in this game and growing to both become better players. 

(Photo credit tp @azn.productions on instagram)

“It’s not really the struggles, we made a lot of mental mistakes on the field.” – Jeremiah Ioane

Finally, we have Jeremiah Ioane who plays for defense as a LB. While some may be frustrated with our loss, Jeremiah stays positive, even after the loss he felt that after playing the Utah team “was good, well you know our first couple games are gonna be very competitive, so we just gotta play better for the outcome that we want”. Additionally, as halftime came he even “felt good that we were playing a hard team and we made some mistakes that put us in a position that we necessarily want, but we were down like 2 touchdowns so I was just trying to motivate the team”. Jeremiah’s hope and positivity is sure to be appreciated in tough games like this, and as this football season progresses, we are sure we will be to see him on the field trying to bring up his team as well as defend them.