Tucker Wade threw for four touchdowns, two of them to Cayden Fitzgerald, and Orange Beach moved to 4-0 for the first time in school history with a 27-7 win at LeFlore on Friday night in a matchup of unbeaten Class 4A, Region 1 teams.
The sophomore quarterback finished 20-of-32 passing with scoring throws of 27 and 65 yards to Fitzgerald, a 21-yard strike to Devin Gause and a 4-yard touchdown to Verchaun Simms.
The win put the ninth-ranked Makos alone in first place in the region at 2-0, a game ahead of No. 1 Williamson at 1-0. LeFlore dropped to 3-1 overall and 1-1 in region play.
A Sophomore Reading the Room
Wade’s explanation of the night was the least dramatic possible version of it.
“We had a really good film breakdown this week and thought we had a good hand on what they were going to do, and it translated to the field tonight,” Wade said. “We were able to kick and throw where they weren’t.”
That is a sophomore describing a week of preparation rather than a performance, which is itself worth noting. Twenty completions on 32 attempts against an undefeated defense, on the road, is not the line of a quarterback improvising. It is the line of one executing a plan he trusted.
The distribution supports that reading. Four touchdown passes to three different receivers, at distances of 4, 21, 27 and 65 yards, is an offense attacking the full field rather than exploiting one favorable matchup repeatedly.
LeFlore Could Not Get Started
The Rattlers were out of sorts from the opening whistle. In the first half LeFlore managed 65 yards of total offense, five first downs and 45 yards in penalties.
Read those three figures together and the shape of the half is clear: an offense that could not stay on schedule, largely because it kept putting itself behind the sticks. Forty-five penalty yards against 65 yards of offense means the flags very nearly canceled out everything the Rattlers gained.
Orange Beach head coach Wade Waldrop’s counterpart, LeFlore’s Jonathan Mitchell, was telling his team afterward that the outcome had been visible during the week.
“We had a lot of penalties that didn’t go our way,” Mitchell said. “We didn’t stop the run as well as I wanted to, even though they hit us on some passes that I think could have went either way. We’ve just got to get back and clean some stuff up as a team.”
While Waldrop praised his players in the postgame huddle for how they had finished their week of practice, Mitchell across the field was making the opposite point to his own team — that a lackluster couple of days during the week had shown up on Friday. Two coaches, one game, and both pointing at the same Tuesday and Wednesday.
Down 7-0 and Still Alive, Until They Weren’t
For all of that, LeFlore entered the third quarter trailing only 7-0. One score. Anybody’s game.
Then it came apart in about eleven minutes.
Wade found Fitzgerald for a 27-yard touchdown at the 6:33 mark of the third. More penalties and a bad punt handed Orange Beach possession inside Rattler territory, and Wade capped the short drive with his touchdown pass to Simms at 1:46 for a 21-0 lead. Fitzgerald then took a short pass and outran the LeFlore secondary 65 yards to the end zone.
LeFlore finally scored on Amaree Shamburger’s 14-yard touchdown pass to Justin Lawrence.
Evan Crochet converted all three of his extra-point attempts for Orange Beach; the Makos missed a two-point conversion.
The Numbers Behind the Result
Three figures explain the game more efficiently than the narrative does:
- 5 — interceptions by Orange Beach
- 4 — quarterbacks LeFlore used after starter John Carter left early with a leg injury
- 6 — three-and-outs by the LeFlore offense in the first half alone
Those three numbers are related. Losing a starting quarterback early forces a team into its backup plan, and then its backup’s backup. Four quarterbacks in one game means the Rattlers never found a stable configuration, and five interceptions is what tends to follow when a series of unprepared passers is asked to throw from behind against a defense that knows it.
Five interceptions is an enormous number in a high school game. It is also a figure that has to be read alongside Carter’s injury — some of those throws were made by players who had not expected to make them.
Waldrop Wanted a Cleaner Finish
Orange Beach led 27-0 and won by 20, and its head coach spent his postgame on the 20 minutes in between.
“Our kids have responded every week,” Waldrop said. “My biggest thing tonight was we’re up 27-0 you’ve got to find a way to finish that game and not let this thing stretch out for 20 more minutes.”
“Penalties, bad snaps … I just want to see us play four complete quarters.”
The complaint is familiar from coaches of teams playing well, and in Orange Beach’s case it carries some weight. A program that has never started 4-0 is by definition operating without much institutional experience of being the front-runner, and the habits that hold up in close games are the ones that get tested in October.
First Place, and What Is Coming
The Makos now sit alone atop Class 4A Region 1. Getting there required beating two teams that arrived unbeaten — Vigor, in a 21-19 upset the previous week, and now LeFlore.
Orange Beach hosts B.C. Rain next, then has an open date before what has become the region’s marquee game: a showdown with top-ranked Williamson on Oct. 2. The bye before that matchup is well placed.
LeFlore faces an immediate test of its own, traveling to Citronelle on Friday — another team that just lost its first game, and another opportunity for the loser to fall two games back in a region where almost nobody is running away with anything.
The Bigger Picture on the Coast
Orange Beach’s 4-0 start is one half of an unusual season along the Alabama coast. Gulf Shores is also 4-0, having beaten Blount 30-29 in overtime the same night. Two programs separated by a few miles of the Intracoastal Waterway are both unbeaten through four weeks, both ranked, and both operating out of recently built athletic facilities.
For Orange Beach, though, the more immediate fact is the one Wade delivered in a single sentence about film study: the Makos knew what LeFlore was going to do, and then did what LeFlore could not stop.