No. 3 Columbine football powers to road win over Heritage

LITTLETON — The beat goes on for Columbine football.

The Rebels — No. 3 in this week’s Class 5A Colorado Preps football rankings — whipped up their 19th straight victory Friday night at Littleton Public Schools Stadium. The streak dates back to last year’s undefeated 14-0 mark on the way to the 5A state championship.

“This is a new season for us. It’s a new team almost entirely,” Columbine senior James Basinger said when asked if players talk about the current winning streak. “We just have to carry ourselves the same way the guys carried themselves last year to keep that streak going.”

Columbine (5-0 record) scored a dominating 44-7 road victory over Heritage in the non-league finale for the Rebels. Columbine scored on its first seven offensive drives, only to take a knee to run out the clock on its final possession of the game.

“We have two special guys,” Columbine coach Andy Lowry said of the running back tandem of Basinger and junior Mark Snyder. “Corbin Dyer is blocking his rear-end off. The offensive line is executing.”

The Rebels graduated the running back duo of Josh Snyder and Mason Moreno — both who are playing Division II football at Colorado School of Mines — combined for nearly 3,000 yards on the ground a year ago. However, Columbine’s vaunted ground game hasn’t missed a beat with Basinger and the younger Snyder brother leading the way.

It was textbook Rebel football with Columbine driving 80 yards in 11 plays on the opening drive, chewing up half the first quarter before Snyder capped the drive with a 5-yard touchdown run. It was the first of two touchdown runs for Snyder on the night.

“You are at the point in the season where you just try to get better every week. You try to execute,” Lowry said. “We have a lot of young guys right now. You have to be patient a little bit scheme-wise.”

Basinger schemed his way into the end zone three times and had well over 200 yards on the ground. His scoring runs of 14, 36 and 61 pushed his touchdown total to 14 on the season through five games.

“We are at where we want to be, but we’ve got to get better,” Basinger said of the machine-like rushing attack. “We’ve got harder opponents going into league. Denver East is probably one of our hardest opponents yet. We’ll need to run better and block better or each other.”

Columbine opens up 5A Metro League play against Denver East (4-1) at 2 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 5, at All-City Stadium in Denver.

The Rebels closed out the win some ball-hawking plays on defense. Sophomore Lijah Vialpondo had an interception and fumble recovery in the third quarter that set up to more touchdowns runs for the Rebels, extending the lead to 37-0 heading into the fourth quarter.

Heritage looked like it would end the shutout bid early in the fourth quarter, driving inside Columbine’s 10-yard line. However, senior James Salazar recovered a fumble to allow one more touchdown drive for the Rebels.

“The defense played great. They came up and made some huge plays,” Lowry said of the Rebels’ defense that caused three second-half turnovers by the Eagles.

Columbine quarterback Brennan Goodwin connected with sophomore Conan Williams for a 10-yard touchdown pass with just over 7 minutes to play to induce a running clock for the remainder of the game with the Rebels holding a 44-0 lead.

“We usually aren’t a ‘young guy’ team, but this year it has worked out that we’ve got some young guys,” Basinger said. “There are definitely some ballers in there for sure.”

Heritage did score a cosmetic touchdown in the final minutes on a 3-yard touchdown run by Jett Balika to prevent the shutout.