ST. JOSEPH — While cool, last evening at Bishop LeBlond High School’s Eagle Stadium wasn’t chilly enough to make it what they call down under a “three dog night” (from which came the name of the 1960s-70s rock-and-roll group), the Chillicothe High School football Hornets did make it a “four quarterback night.”
Expected to be dominant against the host Golden Eagles if they weren’t totally distracted, the Hornets had their minds on the task at hand, pouring through the outmanned private school for 42 first-quarter points as part of a 49-13 win.
“We came out focused, ready to play, and that’s why we put the points on the board the way we did,” Hornets head coach Phil Willard reflected afterward.
“It was good to see that because you’re always concerned about total focus. I feel like our kids did that.”
The greatest concern heading into the game and as the first-period carnage unfolded was avoiding injury and Chillicothe didn’t do that as well as it would have liked.
Several Hornets starters ended up either sitting on the bench or standing along the visitors’ sideline with ice on injured body parts. None seemed initially serious enough to definitely rule them out of next Friday’s Homecoming game against St. Joseph: Benton, but time will sort that out.
“We’re in a meat grinder now that is going to be tough every Friday night. We know that,” Willard said of the remainder of the 2009 Midland Empire Conference seven-game schedule which kicked off with last night’s blowout.
“At this time of year, that’s what you’d better be ready for. Hopefully, we are. I think we’re a little banged up in some areas.
“We’ll see what happens next week in practice.”
Although they came close to breaking one team record and almost certainly could have toppled other team and individual school marks, no known CHS records were reset last night.
While a specific listing from exhaustive research of Randy Dean, sports director of KCHI Radio of Chillicothe, isn’t available, the Hornets may well have set one new standard – fastest scoring of points.
Chillicothe All-State back Bryce Young gathered in Mark Nold’s game-opening kickoff at his 15 and, without breaking stride and only slightly angling off a straight line to the Bishop LeBlond goal line, sped 85 yards to score only 11 seconds into the action.
Given his speed, the yard line on which he took the kick, and the relatively-unobstructed path he was able to take, it would have seem highly unlikely any previous game-opening kickoff return by the Hornets would have taken less time than Young’s. In fact, the previous standard might well have been Young’s TD return that started last year’s victory at Cameron. That one used 14 seconds.
With that easy score setting the tone and placekicker Connor Lindley’s booming kickoffs repeatedly pinning LeBlond deep for the defense, the Hornets didn’t have to accumulate particularly-impressive yardage to rack up the major point production last night.
Chillicothe used three plays each to go 40 and 48 yards, respectively, for touchdowns the first two times its offense got on the field. Brett Stephens and Young each went 24 yards to paydirt to cap them before the opening stanza was half-finished.
A two-play, 20-yard possession ended with a 12-yard Jared McCauslin-to-Alex Thompson TD pass at the 5:27 mark and, after LeBlond fumbled away the ensuing kickoff to Jacob Lewis, Stephens scored his second TD on a one-yard plunge, making it 35-0, Chillicothe, with 3:12 left in the initial stanza.
After another three-and-out and punt by the Golden Eagles, who finished the first half with minus-10 yards of total offense, by C-T computation, Young pulled through a couple of would-be tacklers about 10 yards downfield and went 54 yards to his third TD of the night on the first snap. With 1:14 left in the opening quarter, Chillicothe was within four of its record for most first-quarter points ever, set in the 66-8 October 1998 decimation of now-defunct Tarkio Academy.
Not that it was aiming for the mark, but Chillicothe got one chance to break it when LeBlond threw an incomplete pass on third down on its subsequent possession, stopping the clock with one second left.
Its punt was taken by Josh Rockhold just across midfield and he returned it 11 yards, but was stopped there, leaving the 42-0 spread intact after one.