Scot “D” paves way in win over MG

By ROB HAMILTON

When High­land has won foot­ball games this year, a strong defense has led the way more often than not.

That proved to be true again on Fri­day night as the host Scots (5–3, 5–2 in league play) posted their fourth shutout of the sea­son in top­ping the 1–7 Indi­ans (1–6 in Mid-Ohio Ath­letic Con­fer­ence games) by a 42–0 margin.

“The defense played extremely well tonight,” said Scot coach Chad Car­pen­ter. “I hope to carry that over next week (against River Valley).”

Both the offen­sive and defen­sive units worked together to stake the Scots to a quick 14-point lead.

High­land took the open­ing kick­off at their own 30 and imme­di­ately got 40 yards on a run by Shawn Beltz. Five plays later, David Fisher scored on a 12-yard run to give them an early lead. Quen­ton Miller, who was per­fect on extra points, kicked his first to make the score 7–0.

On Mount Gilead’s ensu­ing pos­ses­sion, they imme­di­ately fum­bled and High­land pounced on the ball. On their first play from scrim­mage, Beltz ran it for a 26-yard touch­down that put his team ahead by two scores.

Car­pen­ter was very pleased at his team’s fast start.

“Absolutely — that’s how you’d want any game to go,” he said. “The kids were ready to play this week. It’s really impor­tant to get a good start and get a lot of momen­tum in the begin­ning of the game.”

The Indi­ans would try to get some momen­tum on their next drive behind the arm of Pay­ton Van­derkooi and the legs of Tyler Bashaw. Three passes from Van­derkooi to Michael Bland net­ted 27 yards and Bashaw ran four times for 19 yards, as Mount Gilead moved to the Scot 21.

How­ever, their drive stalled deep in High­land ter­ri­tory. After a false start turned third-and-three to third-and-eight, Van­derkooi was sacked on the next play. Then, a fourth-down pass was inter­cepted by Gabe Ran­dall to give High­land the ball on their own five.

“We shot our­selves in the foot,” said Mount Gilead coach Steve Ringer. “We’d have a good play and then three bad ones.”

Highland’s run­ning game then dom­i­nated a 15-play drive that ate the final 3:26 of the first quar­ter, as well as 4:30 of the second.

While quar­ter­back Josh Gahm did hit Ran­dall for a 10-yard gain on third-and-nine, all the rest of the yards were gained on the ground. Fisher mus­tered 64 of those yards, but Kyle Minyo, James Cochran, Beltz and Gahm all had pos­i­tive rushes to help out on the drive.

So far this year, the Scots have been able to count on mul­ti­ple backs, with five backs hav­ing over 100 yards this sea­son and two of that num­ber cur­rently being over 700.

“It is nice — we’re very for­tu­nate to have a lot of guys who can run it,” said Car­pen­ter. “We have three really solid backs who do a won­der­ful job.”

After High­land scored a touch­down on a four-yard Fisher run to take a 21–0 lead, Mount Gilead moved into Scot ter­ri­tory once again.

A 15-yard run by Kolby Fisher, a nine-yard dash by Bland and two car­ries for 14 by Bashaw got the ball to the High­land 29, but they wouldn’t get any far­ther down the field.

A pair of five-yard losses on rush­ing plays and two incom­plete passes gave the ball back to the Scots on their 39 with 4:40 remain­ing in the half.

High­land would make good use of that time, get­ting a touch­down on a 29-yard pass from Gahm to Beltz to give the Scots a 28–0 lead after two peri­ods of play.

Ringer felt his team could have done bet­ter tack­ling, as Highland’s ground game car­ried them to 312 rush­ing yards.

“We didn’t tackle well tonight,” he said. “We had guys in posi­tion, but they didn’t tackle well.”

In the third quar­ter, after the Scots stopped Mount Gilead on their first pos­ses­sion, Kyle Minyo returned a punt 69 yards for Highland’s fifth touch­down of the day.

The Scots would add one more score late in the quar­ter, as Andrew Still­well capped a 12-play drive with an eight-yard touch­down run that capped the game’s scor­ing at 42–0.

After the game had con­cluded, all Ringer wanted to do was focus on next week’s game at archri­val Cardington.

“It’s Card­ing­ton week now — enough said,” stated the coach. “It’s a game we look for­ward to every year and they do too.”

In the Scot locker room, Car­pen­ter also was look­ing for­ward to next week’s con­test with the 6–2 Vikings.

“It’s a big league game,” he said. “We want to win, of course, but they have a nice team.”

Posted by Rob Hamilton on Oct 17 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.