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Glenbard South's Cooke adds to impressive totals

On the first play from scrimmage Friday night, Glenbard South junior running back Sean Cooke carried the football 69 yards for a touchdown.

On the Raiders' third offensive play, Cooke went 47 yards for another TD.

And so on.

Cooke slowed his pace a little after that, but not much. The Raiders claimed a 42-0 Metro Suburban West victory against Aurora Central Catholic in Glen Ellyn, their fifth consecutive victory.

Cooke finished with 10 carries for 252 yards and 5 touchdowns. Combined with his numbers from last week's victory at Wheaton Academy, Cooke has 12 touchdowns and 566 yards rushing in his last two games. The Raiders (5-2, 3-0) visit IC Catholic next Friday night.

"He's amazing," said senior offensive lineman Mitch Pohlman, a team captain. "We open up the holes for him and he's gone."

Cooke had a lot of holes to work with.

"He's a very good player," Aurora Central coach John Belskis added. "We saw him last week. It's a combination of that and that they have offensive lineman who block and their receivers block, so there were times it looked like he was untouched.

"I would say it's more of a credit to the people who were blocking. It's easy to run when everybody's being blocked like that."

Raiders coach Ryan Crissey also liked what he saw from the Glenbard South offensive line.

"They're decent-sized, they're an athletic group and they're really intelligent," Crissey said. "Especially with the types of blocking schemes that we're using, our kids have to process a lot of information quickly. We run the same plays over and over and over again, so they're great at what they do."

The victory made the Raiders eligible for the playoffs. With 32 playoff points entering Friday's game, the Raiders seem a good bet to earn a postseason berth already. Not that they're counting on getting in that way. A victory in either of their final two games will clinch a playoff spot.

"We've got to take care of the next two weeks and then we're playoff bound," Pohlman said.

The Chargers fell to 3-4, 1-2 in the conference. They need to win their last two games to become eligible for the playoffs.

"We've got to stop beating ourselves," Belskis said. "We have kids that didn't come to practice yesterday. We're at a part of our program where we're trying to teach kids to be accountable for what they do. We'll get there. Our younger levels both won, our freshmen and our sophomores won, so the future's bright here. But we knew what we had coming in here, and our kids battled as well as they could under the circumstances."

Follow Orrin on Twitter @Orrin_Schwarz

Images: Glenbard South over Aurora Central Catholic, 42-0 in football

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