On Saturday, September 18th, the benches were filled with excited football fans from both Kent and Andover as the first match for the varsity football team came to a start. Just shortly after the second quarter had started, a large roar came from the crowd as Brian Sappington ‘22 scored an amazing touchdown for Kent. With a field goal by Junsung Lee ‘22, Kent was up 7-0. However, Andover came back suddenly in the 4th quarter. Unfortunately, after a hard-fought 2 hours, Andover emerged victorious 13-7 in overtime.

“It hurts to lose such a close game,” Coach Saxton said, “but I am proud of how we played and am excited to build on this start.” Football team captain Tae Suh ‘22 mentioned that Kent’s defense was quite strong. “It was just unfortunate, stuff like that happens. Some assignments were missed throughout the game, but this week is going to be spent cleaning up the mistakes,” Suh said. When asked about the performance of the players in the game, both Suh and Saxton emphasised on the amount of effort they put on the field. Suh went on to say that “I think we beat them in effort, but at the end of the day they just capitalized on the big plays.”

Talking about the next game, Coach Saxton said that “As a team, we need to improve our fundamentals. We need to be lower off the ball up front, and we need to be more aggressive with our assignments.” Suh also mentioned something similar: “I think that that first game, whether it would’ve been a win or not was a spark for the rest of the season. And now that we’ve actually had a full game, we’ve learned what it takes: the conditioning, the preparation. I think that moving forward, in the future we’ll definitely be ready for another team.”

With that only being their first game of the season, the football team has a lot of time and room to improve before their next contest.