The Grosse Pointe South’s varsity football team enters the District Final of the playoffs against De La Salle Collegiate during a home game this Friday. The winner will proceed to the regional playoffs against either Birmingham Groves or Birmingham Senior.
In South’s district semi-final game against Roseville High School, South experienced several injuries. Running Back Matthew Agnone ’25, and team captains Sawyer Weisbrodt ’25 and Andrew Pazuchowski ’25 will not be playing against De La Salle. Defensive lineman Franklin Gallager ’25, will be replacing Pazuchowski on the offensive line for the duration of the game.
“We’re getting some guys stepping up that usually don’t get a chance to play. It’s good to see some new development for the future of this team,” Gallager said. “I think that a lot of us have a good mentality despite what happened last week. We’ve also had a lot of great leaders like Josh Lemanski and Jack Lupo stepping up.”
Last week against Roseville, South’s offense scored the lowest of points all season, as well as the defense allowing the most points. The team managed to win 27-26, with the game ending on a failed fourth-down conversion from Roseville. Team Captain Jack Lupo ’25 has played quarterback for the team the past two seasons, has led them to two consecutive playoff runs and through difficult games.
“Roseville was one of the best teams that we’ve played all season, one of the best teams in the state. It’s very hard to beat a team two times in a row in any sport, and for that I would say we did well on both sides of the ball,” Lupo said. “We’re all brothers, we do everything together whether it’s inside or outside of football and I love the work ethic that we’ve had this year to create these results.”
South has taken every day they have to prepare, even practicing on Election Day when everyone else had the day off. From 3:40 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. the team rigorously runs drills, scrimmages, and conditioning to perfect every position on the field. Throughout their practices this week, Head Coach Chad Hepner put an emphasis that any individual play can make an impact.
“We’ve been preparing all year for this. We knew there were certain teams on our schedule that were going into heavyweights fights like Roseville,” Hepner said. “Even though we beat them by a couple of scores in the first game against them we played all through the end, so we’re pretty experienced in tight games with strong opponents and we expect De La Salle will be no different.”
