St. Andrews stymies Lake

Robbie Robertson/Publisher
The Newton Record

NEWTON September 03, 2008 03:15 pm

— When looking for positives in his team’s 34-7 season-opening loss to St. Andrews, first-year Lake coach Jason Williams found one or two.
“At least we were in shape,” Williams said. “We only got one cramp the whole night and we had about 14 kids that played on both sides of the football. When you don’t have kids come off the field and only have one cramp, I think that says something about our conditioning.
“Hey, and we made a PAT which we haven’t done in a couple of years it seems like. But I knew when Cole (Ballard) ran out on the field he was going to make it, he just had that look so that’s a positve.”
After the conditioning, Williams didn’t have much else to brag about in his debut as the Hornets’ head man.
Lake managed just 76 yards rushing on 29 attempts and threw for another 70 yards for 146 total yards.
“We didn’t block nothing, absolutely nothing,” Williams said. “I don’t know what you call it, first-game jitter or inexpereince, they just din’t block. If you line doesn’t block and your lead blocker doesn’t block, you’re not going to pick up any yards. On the few plays we executed and hit our assignments, we opened holes you could have driven a Mac truck through.”
St. Andrews built a 21-0 halftime lead and led 34-0 before Lake ever scored.
“They still have the same quarterback from last year and he looked like Peyton Manning out there,” Williams said of the St. Andrews quarterback. “He did whatever he wanted really. He really looked good throwing the ball and he took advantage of a couple of situations.”
Williams said despite a few missed assignments in the secondary, he thought his defense played well.
“Considering that it seems like they took the ball over every time deep in our territory, I thought they did real well,” Williams said. “We gave them great field position all night. The one thing I will say is the kids in the secondary would come tell me after a big play that they read it and saw it coming and just reacted a little too late. That means they are learning and I can handle that.”
Lake scored its only touchdown in the fourth quarter when backup quarterback Gary Cooksey hit Charles Bell on a 56-yard pass play. Bell also had 25 yards rushing on five carries and 70 yards receiving and also recorded six tackles.
“Juwan got hurt in the second quarter so we had our fullback running the offense for the rest of the game,” Williams said. “He didn’t do that bad but he hadn’t gotten a lot of snaps either. He did throw a touchdown pass though.”
Jerry Earnest led Lake with 27 yards rushing on six carries and had five tackles and an interception. Donatello Pittman led the defense with 11 tackles, followed by Cooksey with seven. Dwayne Gammage hd six tackles and a fumble recovery.
Next week, Lake will host Enterprise, a 27-19 loser to Newton County.
“They look like a different team than they have in the past few years,” Williams said. “But they will still run the same plays Enterprise has always run. It’s just a matter of stopping them. You just know going into it that they are going to be hard-nose and run it straight at you.”

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