St. Joe’s Prep defeats La Salle in thrilling rematch, advances to District 12 football title game

Anthony Sacca, the tenacious senior linebacker at St. Joseph’s Prep, is planning to play next year at Notre Dame, so this would not be his last football game. But this very well could have been his last game with his high school teammates, and Sacca was not so fond of ending that now.

“I want to play high school football as long as possible,” Sacca, his eye black smudged and his curly hair matted with sweat, said Saturday afternoon after The Prep outlasted La Salle College High School, 21-14, in a loud, intense, and raucous PIAA Class 6A playoff game before a sellout crowd at Wissahickon High School.

St. Joe’s Prep (7-2) is the two-time defending state champion, with eight state titles since 2013, but this game felt different. La Salle (10-1) entered the game as the No. 1 team in several state polls, having beaten the Hawks, 35-34, in a four-overtime thriller on Oct. 5.

“I don’t look at rankings like that,” said Charlie Foulke, the Hawks’ sophomore quarterback who completed all four passes of what would be the game-winning drive. “I just wanted to beat them.”

The Explorers seemed to have the edge in the number of fans at Saturday’s game — but, more importantly, they had momentum. These schools have played for 109 years and have met 25 times since 2013, but the Prep had dominated the series, at least until last month.

“You come out with a loss,” Hawks coach Tim Roken said of the Oct. 5 game, “and the message was, ‘Guys, you’ve got to see that as a gift.’”

Bethlehem Pike en route to Wissahickon High School was backed up an hour before kickoff. The parking lots were so packed that people created their own spots and were warned over the loudspeaker that they could be towed. Fans ringed the fence outside the field.

The student sections — La Salle in white, The Prep on the visiting side in crimson — taunted each other with “You can’t do that!” after every penalty. There were several penalties when players on both sides hit each other after the whistle.

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The Prep took the opening kickoff and capped a 70-yard drive when Khyan Billups scored from a yard out. But La Salle tied it up when junior wide receiver Joey O’Brien snagged a tipped pass and sprinted 30 yards for a touchdown.

On the very next play from scrimmage, the Hawks scored on a 57-yard touchdown pass from Foulke to Rameir Hardy. The first half ended 14-7, and La Salle players could be heard hollering, “Hold your heads up!” as they ran to the locker room.

“It was the two best teams in the state, and you know intensity is going to be high,” O’Brien said. “I just feel like they made more big plays than us. That’s what it came down to.”

La Salle appeared to be doomed when quarterback Gavin Sidwar was intercepted in the Hawks’ end zone and the Hawks drove 80 yards for a third touchdown on another 1-yard run by Billups. But not so fast. Sidwar later unfurled a 66-yard touchdown pass to O’Brien with less than 5 minutes remaining.

Then La Salle forced a punt and got the ball back at its 27-yard line with 1 minute, 46 seconds remaining. But St. Joe’s Prep forced four incompletions, and now it will face another defending state champion in Imhotep Charter — which defeated Abraham Lincoln, 28-26, Saturday — in a Class 6A playoff game next weekend.

“We had our opportunities, and that’s all you can ask for,” said Brett Gordon, the first-year La Salle coach. “We lost to a good team.”

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Not much, it would seem, had changed since the first time these schools played to a scoreless tie on Nov. 27, 1915, in a contest at 44th Street and Parkside Avenue that The Inquirer labeled in a banner headline as a “fiercely fought game.”

It was so ferocious, in fact, that the players actually battled over which team kept the game ball. It had been arranged that La Salle, as a first-year team, would get the ball, but a St. Joe’s player grabbed it and dashed to the clubhouse — but was tackled first, fumbling it away.

Between 1976 and 2003, the teams played on Thanksgiving, with La Salle winning 19 of 29 games. Gordon led the Explorers to Catholic League titles as a quarterback in 1995 and 1996, as well as to a 32-game winning streak. Prep owned the rivalry for a bit, but La Salle bounced back.

Under Brett’s late father, Drew, the Explorers won six league championships from 2006 to 2012 and became the first Catholic League team to win a PIAA state championship in 2010. They returned to the state title game a year later. And then Prep emerged as a powerhouse.

“There hasn’t been a rivalry,” Gordon said. “It’s been so one-sided.”

Before La Salle’s victory on Oct. 5, the Explorers had lost 19 of their previous 21 games against the Hawks. The Prep beat La Salle twice last year by a combined 77-13, a big offeason weight-room motivation for the Explorers.

Gordon, 45, is the father of two and the vice president of sales for a software company. After he excelled as a quarterback at Villanova, he was an assistant coach at La Salle twice: under his father from 2005 to 2014, and under John Steinmetz from 2016 to 2019.

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But he’d spent the last four years coaching his son’s youth football team, so he was a fresh face for the Explorers when he was hired in January.

“When we met for the first time,” Gordon said, “I told them we were going to fix this, turn it around, and do it immediately.”

La Salle won its first six games by a combined 224-43, which included a 21-17 thriller over Malvern Prep, a non-PIAA school that was ranked No. 2 team in the state by MaxPreps.

Then came the victory over St. Joe’s Prep on a tipped but successful two-point conversion.

Before the rematch, Gordon said he thought his team could play better than it had five weeks ago, but quickly added that the Hawks, heavily hit by graduation last year, might feel that way about themselves, too.

When asked if the school’s prolific recent history might give the Prep an edge in the playoffs, Roken said, “Every team has a one-year life expectancy.”

That meant the answer was no. Roken said, “We’re happy to stay together for another week.”

But Sacca did note that the victory “just feels better because it was against La Salle.”