October 28, 2024 – Story and Photos by Joshua Ross
In the immortal words of Allen Iverson…”practice? We are talking about practice?”
That’s exactly what coach TJ Byrne talked about after Hingham’s 28-7 win in Silver Lake on Friday night.
“We had a good practice week,” explains Byrne. “When we put good practices together, it translates to your performance on Friday night. We preached physicality all week in practice. That was the tone of our practices.”
Playing their second of three games on the road to close out the regular season and coming off a pretty bad loss at the hands of Marshfield last week, the Harbormen’s ability to put that behind them shows their mental toughness at this point in the season.
Hingham opened the scoring with junior QB Jake Varholak’s 13 yard TD pass to senior captain Alex Levy. After the Lakers took a 7-6 lead later in the quarter, Varholak scrambled for 51 yards to put the Harbormen back on top in the second quarter. It remained 13-7 until Varholak’s second rushing TD in the 4th quarter. Levy put the finishing touches on the game with a 60 yard interception for a TD.
“We had to flip a switch,” Levy said after the game. “We flipped that switch. We were coming off a loss. We were down on ourselves and realized during the week of practice that we had to get back to what we had in the preseason and rally around each other.”
Most football teams this time of year are battling the injury bug and the Harbormen are no different. Byrne is not surprised with the results from some the players stepping into more prominent rolls.
“We talked as a staff in August about creating depth throughout the year,” Byrne goes onto say. “And we’ve been doing that – necessarily or unnecessarily. A credit to everybody – when the corner goes down and a corner comes in and plays the rest of the game and gets an interception like you see at the end of the game with Ryan Klein, guys have been doing that all year. It’s a great team. It’s great effort like I talked about at the beginning of the year. We talked about effort and attitude and energy, and we have great attributes to this team because of the players that are on it. I’m so happy for their success on the field.”
Levy echos his coach’s assessment when it comes to the depth of their roster.
“We’re a gritty football team,” states Levy. “Next man up is our mentality. There are no ‘twos,’ we are all ‘ones.’ Everybody is a ‘one.’ We are all working together to get wins.”
The players wear shirts that say “All In” on the back. So far, in just his second year, coach Byrne have seemed to get the players buy into that message, which in his words “is encouraging” for the future of this program.
“Hingham is a great sports community, a great sports town with great sports people. There should be no reason why you don’t want to come play football for Hingham. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t want to be part of this program. We are in year two and this is where we were hoping to be and we are projecting in the right way. I’m just proud of the people in this program. I’m excited.”
The Harbormen will close out the regular season on Friday night down in Duxbury. Hingham is currently sitting in 8th in the rankings and would host a playoff game is they stay there. A win in Duxbury would solidify that possibility.