ORONO — It’s been an oddly inconsistent season for Maine placekicker Sean Decloux. But he may have taken an important step out of his funk in Saturday’s 23-10 victory over Stony Brook.

Decloux made 3 of 4 field goals and both extra points to provide 11 vital points. He is the school’s all-time leader in field goals made with 43.

Still, he had failed to connect on four field goals and two PATs coming into the game. And he had a 44-yarder blocked on the last play of the first half Saturday before rebounding to hit a pair in the second half.

“I’m going to try and stay on that and let the misses roll off my back. Hopefully, there’ll be more ups than downs from here on,” said Decloux.

He said he hadn’t been letting the missed kicks weigh on him.

“When you say a senior kicker, it’s something that kind of comes along with the title,” said Decloux. “I’ve been doing this for four years now so it is a lot easier to get over the misses, just as much so as it is to kind of forget about the makes. Because you’re only as good as your next kick or your last kick.”

Maine Coach Jack Cosgrove was happy to see it.

“He’s been battling some injury-type things that he never brings up,” Cosgrove said. “He’s just a kid that takes tremendous pride in his work ethic.”

MAINE DEFENSIVE END Trevor Bates put on a show for the large contingent of schoolchildren who made the trek up for the game from his native Westbrook. He scored the second touchdown of his career in the fourth quarter, when he plucked a fumble out of midair and ran 34 yards to the end zone.

Afterward, he lingered on the way to the locker room to greet the 80 or so middle and high schoolers that were brought to the game by his former coach, Jeff Guerette.

“I knew they had a lot of kids, but seeing them at the end was really something special and just kind of how excited they were,” said Bates, a senior. “I know a lot of football players haven’t really made it out of Westbrook, so I could just see that excitement for them.”

DREW BELCHER ADMITTED to being sore after carrying the football 25 times Saturday. That number jumped off the stat sheet at Cosgrove, who interrupted the postgame news conference to tell his sophomore quarterback:

“Did you know you had 25 carries today? What’s your last name, Cosgrove? I had 24 once up here. You just beat my record.”

Cosgrove played quarterback for the Black Bears from 1973-76.

SOPHOMORE WIDE RECEIVER Ray Bolden was the crux of the offense for Stony Brook on Saturday.

He caught nine passes for 97 yards as the Seawolves managed only 171 as a team. But he didn’t think it was Maine’s defense that stonewalled Stony Brook.

“We weren’t making plays,” he said after his team was blanked in the second half for a second consecutive week. “There were dropped balls, turnovers. There’s nothing that I feel they really did that made us do those things.”

 

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