Telegraph photo by TOM KING Souhegan senior back Riley Lawhorn will be a key for the Sabers in Saturday's Division II title game vs. Plymouth.

AMHERST – Believe it or not, there was a time when Riley Lawhorn didn’t really like football.

He played one year of youth football in the fifth grade.

“I didn’t really like it, so I quit,” Lawhorn said, adding then he turned to lacrosse in the sixth grade.

But lo and behold, today he’s a Souhegan High School football standout as a running back/linebacker, and the Sabers will be counting on him in Saturday’s Division II title game here vs. Plymouth.

What got him back into football? His friends, including a lot of current Saber teammates like Luke Manning and Colin Holland.

“They got me back into the game,” said Lawhorn, who played soccer in middle school but also stuck with lacrosse to the point he committed to attend and play that sport at UMass-Lowell next year. “They were playing a game here, Souhegan Valley, a team they had here in the eighth grade. I was playing soccer on the other side of the field, and could see they were having a blast (on the football field).

“After the game I thought I should probably join. I should definitely play again. Freshman year came, I hopped on the field, and I started playing again.”

And he enjoyed it a lot more, because he was seeing more time on the field than he did five years ago, which was one of the reasons (lack of playing time) he quit the sport. And he did that even though he was on an Amherst Patriots championship Amherst team that beat Bedford. One of the problems was he was playing with players a year or so older than he was, and that included a lot of future Sabers who graduated last year.

But now he’s one of those older players. Lawhorn told Sabers coach Robin Bowkett that it would take a lot of hard work and dedication for the team to shake off last year’s quarterfinal loss to Bow and make it to this year’s finals.

So in the off-season, he went to work.

“I think we all did,” Lawhorn said. “After that loss to Bow, we were all upset with ourselves, thinking we could have done better that year. We set that bar, we worked out, me and A.J. (quarterback Austin Jain) worked together, I worked on my own game, my foot skills, all that stuff.

“We worked together, came together in the beginning of the season in August. Everything came together and that’s how we got here.”

They’ve gotten this far thanks in a large part to Lawhorn’s play at running back – he set the tone opening night with a 234-yard rushing game vs. Hollis Brookline. And he’s been steady ever since.

“He’s just a workhorse, he’s a beast,” Sabers coach Robin Bowkett said. “‘Feed the beast’ is what we like to say about Riley. I would say the one thing that sticks out the most is he’s probably one of the most unselfish kids I’ve been around.

“While he may have his own individual goals, at the end of the day, he just wants his team to win. If he has a really good game, he’s always looking to improve. He’ll say ‘I know exactly what I did wrong coach, I need to do this better.’ Just an exceptional leader.”

Bowkett says Lawhorn has become more of complete back, working on getting his pad level low, utilizing a stiff arm, reading his blocks, etc. “He just refuses to go down,” Bowkett said. “His hands have improved, his pass protection has improved, his run blocking has improved. A lot of kids like to focus on the things they’re really good at, but he’s focused on the things he’s needed to improve on.”

“I love it,” Lawhorn said of running back, saying he wanted to play that position as soon as he got back to football as he had done it in the fifth grade. “I love running, I love making people miss, I love scoring touchdowns.”

His goal was to get 1,000 yards, even in a limited season, and he’s within a range of 100 or so of that.

“He’s a self-made dude,” Bowkett said. “I just can’t say enough about that young man. He’s a physical specimen. I hadn’t seen him in two or three months in the spring because of COVID, and he had a gym in his basement, and I’d see him come out for some workouts in the summer and he was chiseled.

And he also enjoys playing defense as an outside linebacker. He has four interceptions and he’s hoping for a couple more. And he also handles most of the Saber kicking duties.

“He does a great job of setting the edge, he gets off blocks, he’s so strong. And then he’s got the speed to make up for any outside runs. He’s a great player.”

Meanwhile, lacrosse is his main sport as a midfielder, providing more of a college opportunity. Bowkett feels Lawhorn could play college football, but the opportunity for lacrosse at UMass-Lowell was one he couldn’t pass up.

“I stuck more with lacrosse than I did with football,” Lawhorn said. “I personally think I’m better at lacrosse than I am with football. I like the sport, it’s fun playing. It’s not as overwhelming on the body I would say. I can play more games, do more things.”

At UMass-Lowell, he expects to study business/real estate. But he hopes for one last spring season with a lot of the players he’s with now on the football field.

“I played with a lot of the kids on the football team as well as the lacrosse team,” Lawhorn said. “Both are commitment sports. They’re both team sports, there’s no individual.

“I love sharing the game, I love playing with teammates, I love building culture, I love building friendships and memories. I’ve created so much on and off the field through the lacrosse and football as well.”

He hopes to create one more huge memory Saturday.

“We want to show Amherst and the community what Souhegan football is,” he said, “and what we can do.”

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