Lakes stays perfect with homecoming win over Grant
Lakes 43, Grant 14: Running back might stick.
Ethan Greenfield's football career at Lakes has involved a revolving door of positions.
From wide receiver to cornerback to free safety to outside linebacker to running back, Greenfield has had a lot of different vantage points on the field.
The view from running back this season though seems to be suiting him especially well.
A week after rolling up 5 touchdowns in a win over Wauconda, Greenfield added another 3 touchdowns to his season tally to lead undefeated Lakes to a 43-14 Northern Lake County Conference victory over winless Grant.
Greenfield finished with 179 yards on 14 carries for Lakes, which improves to 5-0 overall (3-0 NLCC). Grant drops to 0-5 (0-3 NLCC). He now has 13 touchdowns on the season.
"Running back still feels new," said Greenfield, who has played mostly defense over his career and first got some reps at running back last year, but only on a limited basis while backing up starter Cameron Ruiz, now at Northwestern. "But every week, I've understood more and more and everything is getting easier."
The coaches figured running back would be an easy transition for Greenfield, who is not only fast enough for the position, but savvy enough, too.
"I've had a lot of position changes since my sophomore year," Greenfield said. "But I catch onto things pretty easily. I think the coaches had a lot of trust in me that I could learn the position and do what I do. I give a lot of respect to the coaches for putting that trust in me doing something that I was so inexperienced at."
The Lakes defense opened the scoring by getting a safety (by Gavin Kafka) on Grant's first offensive series, and that 2-0 score held through the end of the fisrt quarter.
Greenfield finally got the Eagles going on offense with back-to-back touchdowns in the second quarter, on a 1-yard run and a 55-yard run.
Lakes took a 15-0 lead into the halftime locker room, and scored again on its second possession of the second half, after a Grant fumbled punt, on a 5-yard run by Dylan DeAngelo. That finished off a six-play drive.
Grant, which got shutout last week by Antioch, finally got on the scoreboard with 3:15 left in the third quarter. The Bulldogs capped a 9-play drive with a 3-yard touchdown run by Kenyon Jones.
Lakes scored three more touchdowns (a 67-yard pass from quarterback Jake Johnson to D'Lo Hardy, an 11-yard run by Greenfield, and a 4-yard run by Ryan Carr) before Grant scored again.
Quarterback Matt McGraw engineered a six-play drive for the Bulldogs and ultimately hit Jacob Lotz for a 32-yard touchdown pass. Lotz (4 catches, 103 yards) had a couple of big catches, including a 50-yarder on the previous possession.
"At the end there, we got a couple fades and it was good to see the offense start clicking," said McGraw, who completed 8-of-18 passes for 141 yards. "We need to build off of that for next week."