The focus for opposing defenses when playing No. 5 Hersey this season has been on quarterback Jake Nawrot, and rightfully so.
The 6-4, 200-pound senior is a four-star prospect committed to Kentucky. He’s the consensus No. 5 quarterback and No. 65 player nationally in his class.
Nawrot hasn’t put up the gaudiest stat line this fall, partly because the Huskies had a forfeit win against Wheeling and haven’t had to play their starters much after halftime.
But in the rivalry game Friday night at No. 13 Prospect, Hersey needed all the offense it could muster. Nawrot delivered, and so did junior running back Jackson Travis. The Huskies piled up more than 600 yards en route to a 48-35 win before a standing-room-only crowd.
Nawrot was 23 of 27 passing for 326 yards for four touchdowns, three of them to Josh Riggs. Travis ran 36 times for a program-record 294 yards and two touchdowns, including a 59-yarder. Nawrot also ran for a short TD.
“It shows that we can do it on the ground and in the air,” Nawrot said. “I don’t care what the stats are. It just showed that wherever the ball was, the one-yard line or … the 50 — we can go and punch it in no matter what. It’s a testament to the work we put in in practice and our preparation.”
The Huskies (9-0, 5-0 Mid-Suburban East) leaned hard on Travis after halftime, when he had 22 carries for 236 yards as they worked the clock.
“For this game, I want to give all my credit to the O-line,” he said. “They had almost the perfect game. I give all my credit to them, but I think we really came together as a team, really executed it perfectly.”
“He’s a beast,” Hersey coach Tom Nelson said of Travis. “A lot of the games we played, we only played [the starters] two quarters, so the stat line might not show it. But I’m super happy for him.”
That feeling extended to the passing game, too, for obvious reasons.
“One of the big things that is a strength of ours offensively is we have balance,” Nelson said. “We use all five eligible players — run, throw, whatever they want to give us, we’re happy to take it.”
Nawrot completed passes to seven receivers, with Riggs leading the way with six catches for 105 yards. Jaxon St. Paul had five receptions for 75 yards and Dom Wentink had the other touchdown catch, a 51-yarder.
Hersey never trailed in a game that turned into a track meet after halftime, when both teams scored 28 points.
Prospect (8-1, 4-1) stayed within striking distance by piling up some big numbers of its own.
Knights quarterback Jackson Cacini, an Eastern Illinois commit, was 24 of 38 passing for 301 yards and four touchdowns with one interception. Matthew Donnelly ran 15 times for 111 yards and a touchdown and had five catches for 87 yards and two scores. Henry Koziol and Gordon Kemp also caught TD passes.
But Nawrot, Travis and the Huskies had too much firepower for the Knights to keep up.
“If we need a play, I’m going to trust that kid,” Nelson said of Nawrot. “What some people don’t realize — they see the stats, they see the throws, they see all that. But we call two plays in the huddle and he gets us the right play. His mental game is just — for a high school kid, I mean, he’s playing chess out there and everybody else is playing checkers.”