Helix gets tricky, beats St. Augustine

LA MESA — Helix High School rode a trick play designed by offensive coordinator Taylor Genuser — who’s also the San Diego Strike Force’s head coach — and a goal-line stand to beat St. Augustine 21-6 on Friday night for its first win of the season.

Backup quarterback Caden Thompson threw a 36-yard touchdown pass to wide receiver Jeremy Robinson on a razzle-dazzle play midway through the third quarter and starting quarterback Lee Norman-Lester threw for one score and ran for another for the Highlanders (1-2).

Helix overcame consecutive penalties deep in its own territory to seal the win by bottling up Pai Polamalu on two straight plays at its 5 and then forced an incompletion by Vince Smith with about six minutes left.

Saints dropped to 0-3.

“That felt awesome to get a win right now,” coach Damaja Jones said. “We were struggling to get Ws our first two games and now we played great.”

The play of the game came on the opening drive of the second half with Helix leading 7-6.

With the ball on the Saints’ 36 and the Highlanders operating in a no-huddle offense, one player came off the field and Genuser pushed Thompson onto the field. Thompson got inside the numbers as required and got set. Norman-Lester turned and threw a backward pass to Thompson, who found Robinson wide open behind two defenders for the score.

“Jeremy Robinson is an amazing athlete, I saw the defenders coming down and I knew my guy was going to be open,” Thompson said. “We installed it Monday, we’ve been repping it in practice and it paid off.”

“We did it so quickly that they couldn’t tell,” Genuser said.

“Since Caden got some time last week at quarterback, I wanted to kind of do a little trick play where we were going to send him out on the field, like, ‘Lee, get out,’ we were going to do a two-quarterback thing,” Genuser said. “So we snuck him in, had to check him in just past the numbers and the deception worked.”

Genuser used baseball terminology to teach the play to the players.

“I said, ‘Lee, you’ve got to turn two to Caden, Caden, you’ve got to catch and crow hop and throw him out.’ That’s what I taught them. Honestly, the technique was double play.”

Genuser recently completed his third season as head coach of the Strike Force, which plays in the Indoor Football League.

“I just had a little fun with trying to find a trick play,” Genuser. “We’ve got to find a way to generate some offense and I was just trying to draw different trick plays on the board. I’ve been doing it long enough to be part of a lot of good ones and a lot of bad ones, and I wanted to give that one a shot.”

Saints second-year coach Ron Caragher called it “a nice play. Backside’s not anticipating it because it’s such a long throw, so credit to the young man who threw it. That ball was in the air quite a distance. So that’s really impressive. We’ve just got to stay back.”

St. Augustine’s left-handed quarterback, Vincent Smith, found Austin Lambeth for a 50-yard catch-and-run touchdown on the fifth play from scrimmage. Callen Moore’s extra-point attempt was blocked.

Norman-Lester scored on a 25-yard keeper down the right sideline late in the second quarter for a 7-6 lead and then threw a 10-yard TD pass to Jake Williams early in the fourth quarter.