OGDEN — Wednesday with the newly snowcapped Mt. Ogden to the east, the Layton Christian football team practiced at the Spence Eccles Ogden Community Sports Complex.

LCA’s first-year coach Ray Stowers ran players through warmups and told them they were the only team in Davis County still practicing, and to take some pride in that fact.

Technically, they were practicing in Weber County, but the point stands pretty firmly: the Eagles are one of a dozen prep football teams in the whole state still playing football, and the only one left in Davis County.

The No. 6 Eagles face No. 1 Duchesne at 11 a.m. Saturday in the 1A state championship game at Weber State — a rematch of a 39-15 Duchesne win in October.

“It’s crazy to think of it because two years ago, some of these guys two years ago never thought that we’d ever play in a championship,” junior Malik Johnson said.

LCA has already pulled off two playoff upsets, the first being a 30-26 win at No. 3 Enterprise, followed by a 14-13 win over No. 2 Kanab at Southern Utah University in last weekend’s semifinal.

As an added bonus for the school, LCA’s travel time is about 15 minutes from campus to Weber State, instead of four-plus hours to southern Utah.

“I think I’m gonna make ’em jog up,” Stowers joked.

The Eagles are 9-4 and in the midst of a 180-degree turnaround following a trainwreck 1-8 season in 2020 that saw the whole coaching staff dismissed during the season in October.

Stowers took over as interim coach, headed up one game and had the benefit of 10 months with the team before the 2021 season-opener.

“I came in and everything was brand-new for them with the whole system and what I was trying to integrate into these kids, but starting the culture, I wasn’t so sure how fast they were going to catch on and buy into what I had for them,” Stowers said.

It’s always tough to win at LCA, which has eight different nationalities represented on this year’s 27-player roster.

Patrick Carr, Standard-Examiner

Many of those kids, like every year, are new to football. Nevertheless, the Eagles score an average of 31 points per game, allow 12.6 and have a handful of players high up the state’s statistical leaderboards.

There are two main running backs, Jessaia Giatras-Moala and Manu Vaitaki, who have both gashed defenses behind an offensive line that has made literal canyons for the backs to run through.

Before last week’s win against Kanab, Giatras-Moala had totaled 1,770 rushing yards in 12 games on 169 carries with 23 touchdowns, while Vaitaki had totaled 978 yards on 130 rushes.

“Jessaia has that speed, he’s just a slasher, he can really turn on an 80-yard touchdown at any given moment. And Manu has that power and, between both of them, they’re such a great combo,” Stowers said. “It’s been a treat watching them both with their own running styles.”

One name to know is lineman Tevita Pome’e, a junior who’s received scholarship offers from Vanderbilt and Oregon State.

Another name to know is Johnson, a junior receiver and defensive back, who led the whole state with 10 interceptions even before last week’s game. He also had 785 receiving yards on 25 catches with 10 touchdowns in the 12 games prior to the Kanab semifinal.

Johnson said the key for an LCA win Saturday is to start fast. Duchesne has outscored teams 106-22 in the first quarter.

“We always come out pretty slow, usually,” Johnson said.  But I think what we’ve done better at these past few games is even though we’ve come out a little bit shaky in the first quarter, we push through in the third quarter and we finish hard and never give up.”

Duchesne, whose mascot is also the Eagles, is 10-1, averages 36.6 points per game on offense and allows 12.7 per game on defense.

Defensively, Duchesne has forced 43 turnovers in 11 games and has made 24 sacks with 54 tackles-for-loss. The team is every bit as good as the No. 1 seed indicates.

As a result of realignment, the 1A football classification was revived following a two-year period of having five football classifications.

Duchesne dropped from 2A to 1A football despite a combined 22-3 record from 2019-20 in 2A. LCA dropped from 2A to 1A after a 4-15 record from 2019-20, even though the rest of the school’s sports went to 3A.

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