'It's an awesome feeling': Ashley football clinches first winning season since 2004
Beyond the excitement and shouts of joy from the Ashley High School football team and its supporters in Week 10, a mentality of confidence materialized as years of yearning for a winning season ceased.
The Screaming Eagles (6-3, 4-2 MEC) turned a dream into reality Friday night, overpowering Topsail 30-6 and securing the team's first season above .500 since the program's inception in 2004.
The win, as it does for so many Ashley players and supporters, represents a transformation in both the team's culture and mindset that has been brewing for the past two seasons.
"It's unbelievable," Ashley coach Dante Lombardi said of the achievement. "I believed in this staff and these players since day one, and it's a great feeling that we have a winning season."
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Getting here wasn't easy, as Ashley went 1-9 last fall, failing to win close games late in the season when it mattered most. But those failures, or as Lombardi puts them, learning experiences, produced a type of determination within the team that otherwise wouldn't have existed.
"Our biggest thing is just family," Lombardi said of the difference in this year's squad. "The (players) are not pointing fingers, even when we were down versus Hoggard and Laney, the whole team lost, not offense or defense did this or that."
Senior quarterback Tyler Carter connected with wideout Dominic Michelangelo for two long scores on the night. Ashley's Nate Hall scored twice, once on a jump pass from Quinn Bentley and again with a fumble recovery in the end zone.
"It's been an adventure," Carter, who's been with the program since his freshman year, said. "It's an awesome feeling, it's a feeling I knew as soon as we stepped into summer workouts that it was going to happen, you just had that feeling that this team is special."
Little panned out for the Pirates (4-5, 2-4), who started the game with three first-half turnovers and missed one field goal.
While Ashley still has a chance to improve its record in next week's regular-season finale with North Brunswick, even a loss would result in a regular-season winning record, something Lombardi says proves how far the team has come.
"Winning is contagious," Lombardi said. "We're still hungry and the players don't want their last (home) game to be tonight; they want to play a playoff game here and I love that about these kids."
This article originally appeared on Wilmington StarNews: Ashley football clinches first winning season since 2004
