Gwinn's Reid Hill, No. 62 at front, blocks for teammate Caleb Anderson, right, during a game played against Bark River-Harris on Aug. 29, 2019, at the Modeltowners field. (Journal file photo)

GWINN — The drought finally ended for the Gwinn High School football team on Friday when the Modeltowners traveled downstate and defeated East Jordan to get their first playoff win since 1999.

Even though the Modeltowners came out ahead in the MHSAA Division 8 first-round game, GHS head coach Ben Olsen said there’s a lot of things his team needs to work on before the second round on Friday night at Iron Mountain.

“Anytime you win is good,” he said. “We know what we’re facing against Iron Mountain. We had some blocking assignment issues and we had two exchanges between quarterback and running back where we fumbled just straight-up handoffs that for whatever reason, we couldn’t handle.

“The quarterback said ‘It’s my fault’ and the running back said it was his. It doesn’t matter whose fault it is, we can’t have … those kind of mistakes against Iron Mountain. We got away with it against East Jordan, but that’s not gonna obviously fly against Iron Mountain.

“So I think we’ve got to clean those up and we’ve been talking about cleaning those up all year and it hasn’t quite happened for us yet.

“So we’ve got one more shot at it, obviously, and hopefully, we can play mistake-free against Iron Mountain. I think if we play mistake-free, we at least give ourselves a chance, but we can’t make those kind of mistakes against a really good football team.”

Iron Mountain has two key weapons Gwinn will have to control.

“They’ve got (Caleb) Evosevich-Hynes, a really good player, their running back and they put him all over the place,” Olsen said. “He’ll line up at quarterback one set and he’ll line up at running back another set. They’ll put him at wing and they’ll put him at wideout.

“So we’ve got to know where that kid is because he’s a game changer and he can almost singlehandedly beat you.

“(Bryce) Pietrantonio is a tight end. They put him either at the tight end spot, or they’ll put him out wide. He’s another one that we have to know where he’s at.

“Iron Mountain runs a lot of single-wing like they always have, but Marty’s (head coach Robin Marttila) also got some other things. We were watching film against Bark River-Harris and they go empty, which is not a typical Iron Mountain team. So we’ve just got to know where their playmakers are, and then they’ve got a quarterback that can sling it a little bit.

“I feel good against the pass because we just played an East Jordan team that, I haven’t statted it yet, but I feel like they threw the ball 50 times on us.

“I think a lot of times in high school football, if you can get the edge on offense and can you set the edge on defense (you) will go a long ways into whether or not you win or lose.”

Gwinn may be seen as the underdog on paper, but Olsen said that doesn’t mean his team is doubting itself.

“They’re the (No.) 1 seed and we’re the (No.) 5 seed,” he said. “On paper, obviously, that favors Iron Mountain and I don’t know if we’ve ever been favored against an Iron Mountain team. But we’ve had some battles with them.

“Like I told the kids, if we can make this a game into the second half, we’ve played, this is gonna be what, our sixth game I think, that we’re gonna play and this could be Iron Mountain’s second game.”

He is right about that as the Mountaineers have picked up four forfeit wins and took one forfeit loss, meaning their only actual game action this fall was a 41-6 victory over Bark River-Harris back on Sept. 25.

Gwinn received two forfeits for a 4-3 record and 2-3 in actual games played.

“And no matter what you do conditioning-wise in practice, it just doesn’t mimic games,” Olsen said.

Ryan Stieg can be reached at 906-228-2500, ext. 252. His email address is rstieg@miningjournal.net.