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WINSTON-SALEM — Another Friday night and another bad day at the office for South Rowan‘s football team.
Only this time the Raiders managed to squeeze lemonade from a lemon of a performance. Their 16-13 victory at R.J. Reynolds barely broke par, yet served as an important challenge met on the road to November.
“I think our team learned how to win a bad game,” coach Rick Vanhoy said after South (5-3 overall) improved to 2-0 in the Central Piedmont Conference. “Our four other wins were pretty much blowouts. The games were over going into the fourth quarter and everybody was happy and jumping up and down. If you made a mistake here or there, you weren’t going to kill the team.”
Last night’s triumph was just the opposite. South turned the ball over four times, displayed poor tackling technique and basically had a devil of a time with the host Demons (1-7, 0-2 CPC).
“This was a game that we had to play until the last minute,” Vanhoy added. “It’s a game that wasn’t over until the horn sounded. And that may be good for us.”
Leave it to Vanhoy to see the good side of bad. He feels the Raiders are better off for the experience, having won despite a well-meaning-but-clunky performance.
“That’s what we needed to do,” he said. “We hadn’t done that yet. We’d played four good games and won them and three bad games and lost them. Now we’ve played a bad game and found a way to win. That’s a good sign when you can do that.”
None of that mattered to two-way lineman Zach Overcash, whose third-quarter interception was one of eight turnovers. “We didn’t play near as well as we should have,” he said. “But in the end we got the ‘W’ and that’s all we came up here for. Who cares how ugly it was? We’re still 2-0 in the conference.”
South got there behind a running game that produced 209 yards — including 102 by rumbler Henry Norman — and an opportune defense led by ballhawk Brad Lanning, the DB who picked off two Reynolds passes in the first quarter.
“Coach told us all week that they have some good athletes, players who make things happen,” Lanning said. “But we’ve got some veterans in our secondary. We reviewed their plays on film. We knew what was coming. It was only a matter of getting it done.”
Lanning got it done just two minutes into the game when he intercepted a pass from scrambling quarterback Jermaine Pitts and returned it 33 yards to the Reynolds 25. Three snaps later Ted Thomas plowed into the end zone on a 3-yard run.
The hosts answered quickly, driving 81 yards in nine plays and trimming their deficit to 7-6 on Justin Woazeah’s 4-yard sweep to the left. South squandered its next three scoring chances before taking a 13-6 halftime lead, thanks to a magnificent 61-yard completion from QB Hoke Shirley to speedster Ricky Childers, who was collared on the Reynolds 2-yard line with 53 seconds on the clock. “That may have been the play of the game,” said Vanhoy.
Ben Wooten’s 39-yard field goal gave the Raiders a 16-6 fourth-quarter lead, but again the Demons refused to fold. They used a hurry-up offense and briskly navigated 92 yards for their final score — a 25-yard TD pass from Pitts to Jeremiah Ellis with 4:34 to play.
South brought a reckless evening in for a safe landing down the stretch, forcing Reynolds to burn its last two timeouts and never relinquishing possession. With lefty Andrew Morgan at the helm, the Raiders played the clock perfectly and drove from their own 25-yard line to the Demons’ 30.
“I knew they couldn’t stop the clock,” said Morgan. “So I just wanted to use as much of it as possible and make sure we held on to the ball. That’s all I was worried about.”
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NOTES: South visits Davie County in a key CPC showdown next Friday. “We’re gonna see the best team we’ve played this year,” said Vanhoy. “We’ve got to be on our game. We’ve got to focus, concentrate and be disciplined.”
South has committed 20 turnovers this fall while its defense has forced 30.
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