MIDDLETOWN — Things felt like they were slipping away.
The offense was sputtering. The schedule was formidable. The overall outlook was not exactly rosy.
That was the Middletown High football team in September 2019, from which many parallels can be drawn to this season’s team.
The 2019 Knights quickly got their act together, won 11 straight games to close the season and captured, somewhat improbably, their fourth Class 2A state championship.
The 2023 Knights ride into the Class 2A-1A playoffs for the first time on the wave of their best win of the season. They beat chief-rival Walkersville on the road last week, 20-14 in a game that many thought they would lose. That raised their record to 4-5, which is uncharacteristically sub-.500 with the postseason set to begin.
This Middletown team has won four of its last six games after an 0-3 start. And the road ahead, starting with this week’s first-round home game against struggling Francis Scott Key (1-8), suddenly looks a lot less rigorous than the rugged gauntlet the Knights have already run this fall.
“We are definitely playing the best football we have all year right now,” sophomore quarterback Brittin Poffenbarger said.
The quarterback of Middletown’s championship team in 2019 was Poffenbarger’s older brother, Reese, who was a senior during that season.
Reese, who is now the starting quarterback for the University of Albany, has helped steer Britton through the challenges of his former job, offering unwavering support and some tough straight talk.
“After every bad game, he’ll tell me what I did wrong,” Brittin said. “Even after the good games, he’ll tell me what I could have done better.”
The learning curve has been admittedly steep for Brittin this season. Being in a leadership position on a varsity team as a sophomore is hard enough. And then there is the pressure of living up to the family name after Reese and older sister, Saylor, were star athletes for Middletown. Brittin said he felt some of that early in the season.
“It’s been very tough,” he said. “It’s everything about being a quarterback, from learning how to read a defense to earning respect from the rest of the team.”
But the team has rallied around Poffenbarger over the course of the season. And, as he has gradually become more comfortable and started to play better, the team’s level of play has risen as well.
“My rule is, when I first got the job [in 2017], I told the team that I was never going to talk about when I played,” said head coach Collin Delauter, a former Middletown player. “I talked to [Brittin] last year, and I said, ‘I am not going to talk to you about your brother at anytime because that’s not who you are. You are Brit.’
“So, that’s kind of the same message we have tried to echo to him, and I think he has really taken some solace from that.”
Much like that 2019 team, the Knights are buoyed by a strong defense that has stymied two of the county’s best rushing attacks, Linganore’s and Walkersville’s, in recent weeks.
Momentum has gradually been building for Middletown, and now, just like that 2019 team proved, anything seems possible. It’s a far cry from the way the season began.
“I think we have really started to step it up, and this is certainly the best time of year to do that,” said senior Griffin Sheridan, the team’s primary running back. “We just have to stay focused on the [opponent] we have every week, and we’ll get there.”
Follow Greg Swatek on Twitter: @greg_swatek
