Haverford High Brings Vivid Memory Of Bad Experience To Ridley

Dylan Cullen can’t forget. Neither could Mike Clancy. Or Mike Gentile. Or Brendan McKain.

The last time visited Ridley, the seniors on this current Fords’ team were sophomores and it was Green-and-White night at Ridley, where the travel to this Friday night in their Central League opener.

They remember all right!

“We were spit on, we had things thrown at us; it was ridiculous,” said Cullen, a senior two-way lineman for the Fords. “We had 8-year-old kids yelling and cursing at us. Our eighth-grade year, when our juniors were in seventh grade, that Ridley game ended in a tie. We’re not afraid of them. They will try to play the intimidation factor. As a family, we don’t care about quickness and their size. There are some things you don’t forget, like when we were sophomores that year.”

The Fords suffered a tough setback in their opener, losing to . But Haverford’s football team has a good sense of what happened.

“We didn’t execute,” Cullen said. “It’s really that simple. I think the biggest thing we learned from the Council Rock North loss was all the little things add up. Our special teams scored our first touchdown when we recovered a punt in the end zone. We had some execution issues and a missed assignment here and there that killed us. We have to tighten things up and we all know that Ridley is one of our biggest games.

"We watched film on Monday and we have to play with the same enthusiasm and mindset that we know what we’re doing have to execute well. We think we’re going to put up a fight, but we won’t go down without a fight. There is going to be a fight, both real fights and actual fights, to win this game.”