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Sep. 13—RIDGE SPRING-MONETTA 21, AMERICAN LEADERSHIP ACADEMY 6
MONETTA — Patience was at a premium Thursday night for Ridge Spring-Monetta’s football team.
It wasn’t just because the Trojans’ Week 4 game against American Leadership Academy took just a few ticks past three hours to finish. Or because there was as much yellow fabric on the field in the form of penalty flags as their jerseys. Or because there were countless other stoppages to keep the action feeling anything but fluid.
It’s because that’s how they wanted it. Head coach Jay Brannon knew his defense was going to put RS-M in position to win, so he wanted to rely on the run game for as long as possible to grind out positive yardage.
Those shorter carries and pop passes, which statistically count as passes but may as well be end-arounds, turned into bigger gains as the game grew longer, all while the defense continued to hold the visiting Patriots in check. RS-M iced the game with two touchdowns in the span of 29 seconds midway through the fourth quarter, sealing a 21-6 win that’s the Trojans’ first of the season.
“We’ve got to keep getting better. We’re a young football team,” Brannon said. “We were able to establish the run tonight. We’ve been working really, really hard on our run game. We couldn’t run it the first two weeks. We’ve got to clean up the holding penalties downfield, but those are effort penalties. We’ll go back and watch the tape and correct their technique, and we’ll get better at that. So that was the big encouraging thing, and our defense was fantastic. They were lights-out all night.”
How lights-out? A missed gap created an open lane for a 44-yard rushing touchdown by Ian Briggs on the Patriots’ second offensive possession. The Trojans only allowed 26 more yards on the other 33 plays run by the ALA offense.
“We’ve got a defense that will…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/ridge-spring-monetta-gets-win-094600540.html
Author : Aiken Standard, S.C.
Publish date : 2024-09-13 09:46:00
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