High school football: Orem wins ‘battle’ with West, moves to 5A quarterfinals

Orem found a way to finish off West 35-27 late Friday evening in the second round of the 5A state playoffs, doing just enough to top the Panthers. 

The teams battled back and forth, trading significant blows in the fourth quarter before the Tigers got their first stop of the frame to ultimately earn the win.

“I’m proud of our guys,” Orem head coach Lance Reynolds said. “Not everything went our way. We knew coming into it, it was going to be a battle.”

The Orem defense was reeling a bit as the Panthers got the ball one last time on the heels of three straight touchdown drives. However, the Tigers remained stout when it mattered most, forcing a turnover on downs to give the school a quarterfinal berth. 

“We had them over on the sidelines (and) challenged them a little bit,” Reynolds said of his defense before it made the game saving stop. “They rose up and made a huge play on fourth down.”

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The way the second half started, it didn’t seem like the Tigers would need a huge play at the end to come out victorious.

Orem started to pull away coming out of halftime, taking a 14-point lead midway through the third quarter, all while holding West to one touchdown up until that point. 

But the Panthers would not go down easily. West countered the Tigers’ scores with its trio of touchdown drives, offset by a Tigers’ house call, putting the Panthers within one point at 28-27 after a successful two-point conversion followed a pair of failed conversion attempts.    

Orem promptly pushed its lead back out to eight on a 10-yard touchdown pass from junior quarterback Tayden Ka’awa to senior running back Ryker Mikkelsen with 4:26 to play. West then drove down to the Tigers’ 12 yard-line before getting stonewalled by the Orem defense.

A couple of kneel-downs later and the Tigers had held on, halting the Panthers’ furious comeback. 

All told, the two teams combined to score nearly half of the game’s points in the fourth quarter. When asked to sum up the back and forth final minutes of play, one word described it for Reynolds.

“Emotional,” he said. “My voice is almost gone. … It was a lot of ups and downs, but man, did (our team) battle.” 

The season ends for West, which finishes with a 6-6 record and a second consecutive season that concludes in the second round of the state tournament. 

Orem will continue its postseason play next Friday when it travels down the road to play Region 7 rival and 4 seed Timpview in a rematch of a game played two and a half weeks ago. 

The Thunderbirds topped the Tigers by two touchdowns in their previous meeting, but Reynolds likes his team’s chances. 

“I was pretty happy with that performance,” he said of the prior contest. “Now we just got to shore up a few things and I think we can give them a good game.”

Kickoff next Friday is scheduled for 6 p.m.