DELAND, Fla. — The No. 1 team in America played its first game of the season on Friday and spent half of it in a fight.
Taihj Moore put DeLand up 6-0. St. Frances answered on an 11-yard Merriman run. Nordman scored and Moore ran in the two-point try for 14-7. Kentae Davis got DeLand within one at 14-13 after a blocked extra point.
Then Vegas Brown returned a punt 79 yards and it was 21-14. Nordman's five-yard run tied it back at 21 and that is where it stood at the break, in DeLand's own stadium, against a team ranked first in the country.
The second half was a different game. Merriman found Kentae Davis from 31 yards to make it 28-21. Sa'Nire Brooks broke a 49-yard run with 7:40 left in the third for 35-21.
DeLand kept coming. Cameron Gensler scored and Moore converted again to make it 35-29, and Kaveon Jackson's seven-yard run tied it at 35.
Brooks answered with a 45-yard touchdown run. With roughly seven minutes left, St. Frances stopped a DeLand fake punt on fourth-and-3 and took over at the DeLand 48. Four plays later Merriman threw 22 yards to Vegas Brown and that was the game.
The quarter lines read 7-14-14-14. That is a team that got better as the night went on rather than one that panicked.
So St. Frances is No. 1 for now, and it spent two quarters tied with a team nobody outside Volusia County had circled. Both things happened and we are printing both.
Sequence and scoring per Gary Adornato's recap for High School On SI. The box is corroborated on MaxPreps and On3.
