Under the stadium lights at Dartmouth Memorial Stadium, rivals Dartmouth and Bishop Stang faced off in the annual ‘Battle of Slocum Road’ football game on Friday, Sept. 5.

Entering a game that many thought Bishop Stang would win, Dartmouth came out on top, winning by a score of 23-9.

“There were a lot of doubters out there saying that Stang was going to win, but the score says otherwise,” said Dartmouth team captain and senior Brady Beauearland.

Beauearland’s co-captain Michael Hauck said the team “came in as the underdog,” having lost 20 athletes to graduation in the spring.

“We knew we were facing a lot of adversity,” he said.

Dartmouth High School Head Coach Rick White said that with a lot of new starters on the field, the team “didn’t really know how it was going to go today.”

“We went exactly the way we wanted to,” White said.

Hauck said that while the team made some mistakes during the game, the teammates “didn’t get down on each other.”

“That’s why I think we won, because we made some mistakes, but after the mistakes we built each other up,” he said.

Beauearland said that the athletes have been playing together “forever” and because of this, they “always pick each other up.”

During halftime, with the score 7-3, the Dartmouth players talked and “knew we had to come out fire, and that’s exactly what we did,” Beauearland said.

White said the game “wasn’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination,” with both teams making some mistakes.

Despite mistakes, White said he thought the team’s defense “just kept coming up big with the fumble recoveries" and noted that interception “was huge.”

Bishop Stang Head Coach Dennis Golden acknowledged that Dartmouth “did what they needed to do on the first drive,” noting that his athletes “fought back.”

“7-3 at the half, we tightened up our defense,” he said.

The Dartmouth-Bishop Stang game was the first game of the season for Dartmouth, and Hauck now has some goals for the rest of the season.

“Just keep doing what we did today, push each other, don’t get down on each other when we make a bad play,” he said.

He noted that the win against Stang leaves him “officially 4-0 against Stang in my high school career.”

He added, “They do talk a lot, so it’s nice to be able to kind of rub it in their face after, but it’s all love at the end of the day.”