Plainfield South-Joliet West to resume Monday

Updated: September 3, 2011 7:19PM

The first football game played on the new turf at Joliet West will not soon be forgotten.

In fact, it is not over.

Plainfield South visited West for a scheduled 1 p.m. start Saturday afternoon at Klootwyk Field. The sophomore game went long enough that the varsity started at about 2, when the heat and humidity were at their peak.

Ah, but not to worry. After about 10 minutes of football, Mother Nature threw another biting curveball.

The storms rolled in, complete with lightning, which meant a mandatory delay.

West led 8-6 with 2:04 left in the first quarter when play was stopped at 2:27 p.m. After much discussion between game and school officials, play resumed at 4:18.

About an hour later, with South now leading 12-8 and 5:56 remaining in the third quarter, more foul weather arrived. That was it. The game will resume from that point — South is facing a fourth-and-5 at its 36-yard line — at 11 a.m. Monday.

Coaches Ken Bublitz of South and Jason Aubry of West, both attempting to get their teams in the win column after they dropped their openers last week, were uncertain what to do with their teams between the suspension of play and the resumption.

“I’ve never been involved with playing a quarter and a half like we will do Monday,” said Bublitz, whose team will have a short week to prepare for Oswego East on Friday night. “It is a strange feeling going home not knowing how the game is going to come out. It is difficult to say how everyone will respond to this.”

“This is amazing,” said Aubry, whose team will entertain Sandburg next Saturday. “It’s a marathon game right now. My coaches asked me, and I really don’t know what we should do. I’ve never been involved in anything like this. You wonder about rebuilding the emotion, the enthusiasm, that was there today.”

Neither coach was upset with the officials, however. They noted that they did all they could to play the game but play it safely.

West jumped to an 8-0 lead when SaVaughn Alexander burst through the middle and went 69 yards for a touchdown with 7:29 left in the first quarter, then ran the two-point conversion following a South offside penalty.

“That was a tremendous explosion by SaVaughn,” Aubry said.

A couple of West penalties aided a South drive that ended with Dantrell Wright’s 1-yard TD run at the 5:12 mark of the first quarter to make it 8-6. The conversion kick failed.

Aubry called the interception by West defensive back Greg Amos to end the first half “huge. He went right up and took it away from Wright.”

But South took the second-half kickoff and marched to the go-ahead score — 58 yards in 14 plays. Wright’s 10th rush of the drive was his second 1-yard scoring run of the long afternoon.

“We lacked consistency today offensively, but our defense was tremendously improved after their long run early,” Bublitz said. “We made some big stops.”

“Like last week we score first and then we (fizzle) out on the offensive side,” Aubry said. “But we did show we can run the ball.

“Defensively, we were pretty good. They get up and go on offense, they play quick, and we made some adjustments to that.”

More “in-game” adjustments will be made by both coaches — or not — before 11 a.m. Monday. What a weird Game 1 on the turf field at West.

© 2012 Sun-Times Media, LLC. All rights reserved. This material may not be copied or distributed without permission. For more information about reprints and permissions, visit www.suntimesreprints.com. To order a reprint of this article, click here.