By David Shaw
dshaw@salisburypost.com
BELMONT ó South Point welcomed alumnus Jason Rollins back to Lineberger Stadium Friday night. It’s too bad the host Red Raiders showed up as well.
South Rowan put up little resistance in its 3A playoff opener and was sent home with a season-ending 42-6 loss.
“It would have been great to win it for our coach,” defensive back Quan Glaspy said after SR finished 5-7. “We just came out a little flat. We had a bad start and never got going.”
South Point (11-1) ó seeded No. 2 in the bracket ó rushed for 335 yards, got five touchdowns from junior fullback Aaron Crumbley and easily advanced to next week’s second round.
“We tried some different schemes with them,” Rollins said. “We tried changing things up and take different responsibilities on some options. Sometimes we’d hit it right and sometimes they saw what we were doing.”
South Rowan didn’t do much until late in the final quarter, when junior D’Andre Harris scored on a 5-yard touchdown run to close the scoring.
“I just wanted to get into the end zone,” he said after notching his 17th TD of the season. “No one wanted to end up with a big zero.”
The points and yards were hard to come by for the Raiders, who managed only 88 yards on the ground. Harris led the team with 45 ó most of them in the fourth period ó and finished the year with 1,026.
“I’m excited for him,” teammate Blake Houston said. “Hopefully he’ll come in next year and get a thousand more.”
Harris was stopped for losses on each of his first four carries. His biggest gain went for 19 yards against South Point’s reserves with about seven minutes to play.
“They blitzed almost every play,” Harris said. “Every time I looked up, they were right there. It was rough at times, slipping around out there.”
The home team had no such problem. SP turned its first four possessions into touchdown drives, highlighted by Crumbley, a 190-pound shot of Red Bull who ran for 177 straight-ahead yards.
“That fullback was hard to bring down,” said Glaspy. “You had to hit him and wrap him up. He wasn’t going down if you didn’t wrap him up.”
Crumbley opened the scoring on a 1-yard TD run with 8:23 remaining in the first quarter. His second score came on a 28-yard burst ó one play after winning quarterback Desmond Lowery, who rushed for 106 yards on eight carries, raced 52 yards into SR territory.
“We didn’t stay with our assignments,” linebacker Cadarreus Mason said. “We kept slipping away from that. That was the key.”
Crumbley, who now has 35 touchdowns this fall, turned the field into his personal playground in the second period. He literally hurdled a South Rowan defender on a 61-yard touchdown run, giving the Red Raiders a 21-0 lead.
“We tried to do what we could,” Rollins said. “But you’re playing a chess match, trying to figure out who’s gonna end up in the end. That’s the way it goes.”
And that’s the way it went in the second half, when Crumbley scored on touchdown runs of one and 15 yards. By then, SR was giving away yards at year-end clearance prices.
“We were practicing good all week, hoping for a close game,” said Houston, who completed seven of 14 passes for 74 yards. “But they blitzed us a lot, and that made it tough to run the option. We really wanted to give (Rollins) a win on his old field. I hate that we couldn’t do it.”
Rollins, for his part, was graceful in defeat. “I’m so proud of you guys,” he told his huddled players as a steady rain dropped from the sky. “It was a helluva ride.”
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NOTES: South Rowan turned the ball over three times and confiscated only one loose ball ó Steve Erwin’s fumble recovery late in the third quarter. … As playing conditions worsened in the second half, neither team completed a pass.