Cameron Lemons, Bureau Valley defense shine in win over Hall

SPRING VALLEY – Cameron Lemons had never scored a touchdown in his high school football career.

He picked a good time for his first one Friday night.

The Bureau Valley senior scored on a 12-yard touchdown run with 8:33 left in the game to clinch the Storm’s 18-8 win over the Hall Red Devils in the Three Rivers East opener at Nesti Stadium.

Elijah Endress (8-yard run) and Corbin Chhim (22-yard catch) also scored for the Storm, who improved to 2-1 and 1-0 in the Three Rivers East.

Lemons finished the night with 131 yards rushing on 23 carries and gave all the credit to his linemen.

“If I didn’t have my teammates blocking, I wouldn’t have the runs that I did,” he said.

BV coach Mat Pistole said it was just a matter of time for Lemons to find the end zone.

“First two games, he’s had 50-yard runs and then somebody else punched it in. This game he finally put it in,” he said. “Nobody works harder than Cameron Lemons and he deserves all the credit in the world.”

The Storm forced Hall (1-2, 0-1) to throw the ball and the Red Devils are not a passing team, though senior quarterback Gianni Guerrini completed 9 of 20 passes for 157 yards with two interceptions.

“I can’t say enough about coach [Phillip] Przybyla and the defensive staff and our kids and how they executed the game plan and how locked in they are. They came to win tonight and we took care of business,” Pistole said

“We’re not a throwing team and we were in that situation tonight. We’ve got to be able to run the ball,” Hall coach Randy Tieman said. “They were way more physical than us. And we talked about this all week. It shouldn’t have been a shock to our guys. You’ve got to come off the ball and open up holes for the backs. We did not do that tonight.”

The Red Devils were held scoreless until Braden Curran hauled in a 70-yard catch from Guerrini on a carom off a helmet on the next play after Lemon’s touchdown.

Curran also caught the two-point conversion pass to make it 18-8 with 8:20 left.

The Storm defense stiffened and didn’t allow the Red Devils to get past midfield again.

Tieman was not surprised to see the Storm play so well.

“They’re improved. Mat’s done a great job over there,” he said.

After a scoreless first quarter, the Storm put together a 14-play, 76-yard scoring drive to open the second quarter with Endress cashing in on an 8-yard touchdown run with 4:14 left before intermission.

Storm quarterback Bryce Helms found Chhim open for a 22-yard scoring strike at the 3:20 mark of the third quarter. The pass for the conversion failed, but the Storm led 12-0.

Lemons said the Storm’s balanced attack makes their offense go.

“It’s not one guy. It’s multiple guys,” he said. “All of us putting in work, so we try to spread the plays out for everybody. I don’t think it’s one person to go to. The team works together.”

“We feel like we have a lot of weapons offensively,” Pistole said. “We can move the ball, we can throw to a lot of different people. We just got to execute at a higher level and I think our offense will really take off.”

Coming off a 1-8 campaign in 2022 and picked by some to not win a game this year, Lemons said it’s nice to get off to such a good start.

“It feels good making people wrong and really show them what we’ve worked on these past couple years,” he said.