MOUNTAIN VIEW — No. 5 St. Francis had a simple approach when facing No. 7 McClymonds on Friday night. Give Kingston Keanaaina the ball, and clear the way.
“At the end, we had to ride our guy, and it was working,” said St. Francis coach Greg Calcagno.
Keanaaina carried the ball 36 times for a school-record 357 yards and three touchdowns, leading the Lancers to a lopsided 34-14 win over the Warriors. St. Francis improved to 2-0 this season.
Keanaaina’s performance bested that of Viliami Teu, who rushed for 344 yards on 45 carries against Serra in 2021.
“Man, honestly, it’s the line,” Keanaaina said. “Everything starts with the line. And just being able to trust in my line every single snap, every single play, that’s probably the biggest reason our run game is the way it is.”
So how many carries was Keanaaina ready for on Friday?
“However many the coaches wanted me to get,” he said. “They prepared us really well during the week for a great team like McClymonds. So it was just whatever the coaches were ready to give me.”
Keanaaina, a BYU commit and three-star prospect according to 247Sports, was the engine of St. Francis’ offense all night long. He got the Lancers on the board first with a 19-yard touchdown run right before the end of the first quarter.
That set up St. Francis’ passing game, which paid dividends when Perrion Williams snatched an 8-yard TD catch on a contested throw from Aaron Knapp. Those scores gave the Lancers a comfortable 13-0 halftime lead.
“We knew they didn’t have great numbers as far as number of kids,” Calcagno said. “So if we can lean on them a little bit that way, that was sort of the strategy. But we wanted to be balanced.”
McClymonds dressed about 20 players for Friday’s matchup, and St. Francis’ depth started to take its toll in the third quarter. To cap off a nine-play drive that featured six runs by Keanaaina, Knapp found Grant Righellis on a slot fade from 4 yards out to put the Lancers up 20.
“St. Francis football, it’s really just us being able to pound, pound, pound,” Keanaaina said. “As a running back, I love that, being able to have the coach trusting me to make a play every single time.”
McClymonds had a rebuttal ready. In four plays, the Warriors marched 59 yards, scoring on Berell Staples’ beautiful deep ball to Rahsjon Duncan from 39 yards out. Dominic Davis ran in a direct snap for a 2-point conversion, and Mack was suddenly down 20-8.
“There’s 19 of us,” Staples said. “There’s about 60 of them. Us 19 guys, we’ve all got to have heart.”
St. Francis flexed its running game once again on the next drive. Keanaaina took the first three carries 49 yards to set the Lancers up in plus territory. Two plays later, he toted the rock again for a 24-yard touchdown that gave St. Francis a 27-8 edge with room to breathe.
McClymonds had one more answer in the fourth quarter. The Warriors engineered a 10-play, 63-yard drive that featured a key fourth-down completion by Staples and ended with a 17-yard touchdown run by Sharky Tamale.
“These games show us what we’ve got to do,” Staples said. “These are the hard games. We are expecting to be on that level. That’s the level we want to be, and that’s what we expect from ourselves. So this is why we play these teams.”
St. Francis finished the game off with one final run from Keanaaina. On his 36th carry, the senior star burst through the line, broke multiple tackles and finished in the end zone for the third time after traversing 30 yards.
