High school football: Orem dominates Springville in lopsided 5A championship

It didn’t take long for Orem to have the 5A championship game against Springville essentially all wrapped up.

Utah commit Aisa Galea’i dominated with a 60-yard touchdown run in the first quarter, a 78-yard pick-six in the second and a 96-yard kickoff return in the third en route to a 42-7 win in Thursday’s championship game.

“Honestly, I’m really proud of them,” said Orem head coach Lance Reynolds. “That’s a lot of work. When you’re winning and you’re beating people up, at times we’re beating people up toward the latter part of the year, and my biggest concern was complacency.

“I worried that we’d let off the gas a little bit. I just kept re-emphasizing it, and these guys, they believed.”

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It was pure domination in all three phases for the Tigers Thursday.

Defensively, Orem didn’t give up much in the first half. The only chance Springville had at putting points on the board was a 46-yard field goal attempt in the first quarter, but it went wide.

Springville managed only 118 yards in the first half.

Orem star defensive lineman and BYU commit Juni Moala had two sacks in the dominant win. The Orem defense as a whole had three sacks and 10 TFLs.

“We came out here, we knew they were going to run, we knew they were going to play physical just like last time, and we wanted to come out and do the same thing, if not do a little bit more,” Moala said.

Meanwhile, the Tigers’ offense capitalized on big plays. Alabama commit Tayden Ka’awa found Mack Ellison in the first quarter for a touchdown, and Galea’i scored twice in the first half as Orem earned a dominant 21-0 lead at intermission.

Orem lost no momentum out of halftime. Galea’i scored his 96-yard kickoff return on the opening kickoff of the half, and then the Tigers kept the ball on a successful onside kick.

Orem’s Beckham Curtis then ran it in from 21 yards out to give the Tigers their second touchdown of the half, all before Springville even had a single offensive snap.

Springville’s lone touchdown came late in the third quarter on a 43-yard strike from Beau Halvorsen to Stafford Small, but Orem’s Max Stonebraker added a touchdown run to give his team the 42-7 lead.

Galea’i ended the night as the most productive man on the field with 242 all-purpose yards, including three touchdowns.

“I knew my brothers were going to block for me, and I just wanted to execute the plays for them,” Galea’i said. “It wasn’t really anything new. It’s something that we practice and practice all the time.”

The win starkly contrasted the Tigers’ win earlier this year over Springville in region play. Orem still won that game, but only by the skin of its teeth, 17-14.

That game and Thursday’s game were the only losses of the year for Springville.

“It was a lot better, a lot better,” Reynolds said of his team’s second performance against Springville. “The mistakes, and looking back, I watched that film probably 30 times this last week, and we made a lot of dumb decisions.

“I did some dumb things I don’t normally do. They made some bad mistakes. I was not happy...but tonight I felt like if we could go out there and just play our game, stay inside of our scheme, I think that the chips are going to fall where we want them to, and they did.”

Thursday’s championship win is Orem’s 10th in school history and its first since 2020.