Indians pull away from Rockets in fourth quarter

By ROB HAMILTON

Mount Gilead’s foot­ball team broke into the win col­umn on Fri­day thanks to a second-half scor­ing explosion.

The Indi­ans only held a 7–0 advan­tage at the inter­mis­sion and, despite their offense start­ing to click more con­sis­tently in the sec­ond half, didn’t seem able to shake the Rock­ets, who matched them score for score until the early moments of the fourth quarter.

How­ever, after the Rock­ets got a touch­down on the first play of the fourth period on a 21-yard scor­ing recep­tion by Spencer Golden to climb within a 21–14 mar­gin, the Indi­ans took over the game, which they wound up win­ning by a 41–14 score.

Tyler Bashaw gave the Indi­ans good field posi­tion by return­ing the ensu­ing kick­off to the Ridgedale 30. The Indian senior then con­tin­ued to help the team by run­ning for 16 yards on a play that also saw the Rock­ets flagged for a per­sonal foul — mov­ing the ball to the seven-yard line.

Ron­nie Fer­gu­son then gained six to set up a one-yard score by Bashaw. Michael Bland, who hit five of six extra point tries, then made the score 28–14.

Bashaw then made a big play on defense, recov­er­ing a Ridgedale fum­ble and sprint­ing roughly 45 yards for another Mount Gilead touch­down to give them a 35–14 lead with 9:46 to play in the game.

After the Indi­ans stopped their guests on downs on their next pos­ses­sion, it didn’t take long for them to put the game away, as quar­ter­back Bran­don Young hit Bland on a 38-yard com­ple­tion that resulted in another touch­down. While the extra point was missed on that score, Mount Gilead’s 41–14 lead eas­ily held up the rest of the way.

Mount Gilead coach Steve Ringer was happy with how his team fin­ished off the game, espe­cially after last week when Elgin made a second-half come­back to top­ple the Indians.

“I hope we learned from last week,” he said. “It was dis­heart­en­ing to lose that game, but this week, when­ever Ridgedale answered, we’d come back. We played hard in the sec­ond half and really stepped it up, but still have to put a full game together.”

Ringer felt that his team made too many errors in the first half. The main prob­lem was issues in the shot­gun for­ma­tion with the center/quarterback ex-change, as mis­played snaps stalled more than one drive.

For­tu­nately for the Indi­ans, their defense pre­vented Ridgedale from cap­i­tal­iz­ing on any­thing in the early going. The Rock­ets had a golden chance to score on the game’s open­ing drive, as they moved the ball to the Mount Gilead 16, but a fum­bled snap fol­lowed by two quar­ter­back sacks pushed them back to the 36 and forced them to punt on fourth-and-30.

While the Indi­ans strug­gled to get things going offen­sively in the first half and suf­fered two turnovers, they did muster one strong drive that led to them hold­ing a seven-point half­time advantage.

Young led the team on a 13-play drive that ate nearly seven min­utes off the clock and ended with a two-yard score by Bashaw with 10:32 remain­ing in the sec­ond period. A 44-yard pass to Bland was a key play on the drive, mov­ing the ball from the Indian 5 to their 49, as they went the length of the field for their touchdown.

In the sec­ond half, the MG coaches decided to scrap the shot­gun and also worked on run­ning the ball to the out­side — two fac­tors that con­tributed to their 34-point sec­ond half.

“We noticed we were hav­ing trou­ble with the shot­gun snap and decided to go under cen­ter,” said Ringer. “We got them the jet sweep in the sec­ond half.”

While Mount Gilead didn’t score on their first pos­ses­sion of the sec­ond half, their defense shut down the Rock­ets again and they got the ball on the Ridgedale 36 after a bad snap on a punt attempt.

Then, with the ball on the Rocket 17, a pass to Kolby Fisher was deflected, but landed in Steven Harman’s hands to boost the Indian lead to a 14–0 margin.

Ridgedale came right back with a 59-yard scor­ing run by Daniel Payne, but the Indi­ans responded; going 64 yards in seven plays. Both Bland and Ron­nie Fer­gu­son had runs of 20 or more yards on the drive and Fer­gu­son fin­ished the drive with a one-yard touch­down run to make the score 21–7.

While the Rock­ets kept the score close into the fourth quar­ter, Mount Gilead pulled away over the final 12 min­utes to improve to 1–2 on the sea­son. Ridgedale falls to 0–3.

Ringer noted that his team stepped up when they needed to on both offense and defense to both pre­vent the Rock­ets from get­ting momen­tum and then to put the game away in the final minutes.

“That’s what we need to be a good foot­ball team — some­one to step up and make big plays,” he said. “It’s about know­ing their assign­ments and doing their assign­ments and mak­ing a big play.”

Posted by Rob Hamilton on Sep 12 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.