NEW MARKET — Southmont football’s electric offense has put up 40+ points in every single one of their wins this season. That trend continued again on Friday when the Mounties welcome their county rival Crawfordsville. It was also homecoming for the Mounties and it ended up being a very happy one. South withstood an early gut punch by the Athenians in the opening quarter, but after that rolled to a 48-18 win.
32 total points were scored in the first 12 minutes of the ball game. Cville got the ball to begin and marched right down the field. They scored first on a 4th and goal pass to Ethan McLemore. South responded with a touchdown of their own on a five-yard TD by Wyatt Woodall. And then the fun really began.
On their first play of the drive McLemore made a 65 yd house call to the end-zone and just like that Cville had the lead back. But not so fast. The Mounties had a house call of their own to make and that was in the form of Nolan Boyer who scampered down the sideline and scored an 80 yard TD on the Mounties first play of their drive. That made the score 14-12 Mounties, and South added one more touchdown before the quarter ended thanks to Kyler McCandless. McCandless intercepted Cville quarterback Kaden Patton and then promptly scored a 30 yd touchdown just a few plays late. From the 6:43 mark until 1:04 left in the first both teams combined for five touchdowns.
“We took another punch tonight and were able to respond thankfully multiple times,” Southmont coach Desson Hannum said. “We haven’t been able to get an opening drive stop hardly at all this season. That’s something that we know we’ll have to improve on for next week. Our offense has been able to put up points, but we can’t get into situations where we’re getting into track meets with people.”
For the game Southmont tallied 513 yards of total offense. 331 came on the ground. Boyer ended the game with 141 rushing yards and 182 passing on the night. Woodall had 77 yards on the ground and two more TD’s to have 12 on the season. Sophomore Cale Chadd is really beginning to shine for the Mountie offense. He had 88 yards on the ground on just seven carries and two scores as well. McCandless ended the game with four catches for 117 yards.
“First off I think Nolan threw the ball about as well as he did all year tonight,” Hannum said of his senior QB. “Kyler and Aaron give us the ability to stretch the field and Aaron probably played his best all around game of the year tonight. Cale ran the hard and he is starting to block really well and that’s one thing that our backs have to be able to do.”
For Crawfordsville (0-5, 0-3 SAC), coach Brad Clark wanted his team to play a complete four quarters as they’ve played well in spurts at some point in every game this season. Friday was that opening quarter. The Cville offense wouldn’t score again until 3:53 left in the game.
“We knew that we were going to have to score to be able to win this game,” Clark said. “We liked our plan coming in and early it was working as our kids were executing at a really high level. The difference in the game was that South had an answer for every score we had and we didn’t answer when they scored when we needed to. We made the issues worse on ourselves tonight with all the big plays we gave up. We just had some lapses and some things we need to fix because you can’t give up big plays to a good team like that.”
The Athenians tallied 257 total yards of offense. Patton ended the game 16-33 for 197 yards and two touchdowns both to McLemore. He also threw three interceptions and now has seven picks over his last two games. McLemore did his best to keep CHS in the game and finished with eight catches for 137 yards.
“I say that E-Mac is a special player every single week because he truly is,” Clark said. “He’s a guy that teams have to try and stop so we really moved him around a lot. We’re lucky to have a player like him on our team.”
Southmont with the win improves to 4-1 (2-1 SAC) on the season with the win.
During the homecoming festivities at halftime, boys soccer player Logan Link and volleyball player Cheyenne Shaw were crowned the homecoming king and queen.
SAC play continues next week for both teams as the Mounties will travel to Danville (3-2 2-1 SAC) and the Athenians will be back at home for their homecoming when they host their other county rival in the North Montgomery Chargers (3-2, 2-1) who pulled off a big time 20-17 win over Western Boone on Friday.
