FHS Warriors Football Ends Season With Big Win

The Franklin High School football Warriors ended their Covid-shortened season November 7 with a bang, dominating Perth Amboy at home, 40-13.

The win bookmarked the Warriors’ 2-3 home season, with their other victory coming in the first home game of the season against the Edison Eagles.

The Warriors started the game showing they were there to play with senior Ricardo Folkes returning the opening kickoff for an early Franklin score. A missed extra point gave Franklin a 6-0 lead.

The Panthers took the lead briefly, 7-6, before a tremendous second effort by Quasim Ashford put the Warriors back in command.With multiple Panthers trying to bring him down, Ashford powered more than five yards into the end zone for the score.

Here is the sequence of Ashford’s touchdown (Click on the first picture to begin):

Franklin never trailed again as the Warriors outscored the Panthers 27-6 – including a two-point conversion – for the win.

Warriors’ head coach John Paczkowski said Warriors’ fans have a lot to look forward to in the coming years.

“This is a very young team,” he said. “There were freshmen on the field today. We had freshmen, we had sophomores, the future’s bright.”

“Next year we’ll have a lot of sophomores and juniors, but they’ll have varsity experience, so they’ll have something to look forward to,” he said.

Speaking of Folkes’ end-to-end kickoff return to start the game, Paczkowski said, “That’s something that we’ve seen the ability for us to do all year, and it was great to see it come together in the last game.”

“It was great to see the team start coming together in a very unique year, under extreme circumstances,” he said. “We were very fortunate to stay healthy, so we may not have had as many wins as we wanted to for the season, on the field we did have the win of beating Covid, where we weren’t shut down. That’s a compliment to the players and the parents, to make sure they’re doing the right things on an off the field.”

Here are more scenes from the game:

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