HALCOMBE PACES PURPLES OFFENSE AS BGHS REMAINS UNBEATEN IN 32 GAMES AGAINST GREENWOOD
You had a sense, in warmups.
Everybody wanted to keep an eye on the skies, on account of the fact that weather was supposed to be a significant factor in Friday night’s KHSAA football game between longtime rivals Bowling Green High School and the relative new kid on the block, Greenwood High School.
The Purples made the short trip up Scottsville Road to The Swamp, where they trotted out pre-game holding a giant American flag and the Kentucky state flag. They made their way around the soft, damp field — gotta love that they still play on God’s green grass at The Swamp — before taking their place on the visitors’ sideline.
And they were much bigger than the Gators, warming up at the other end of the field. Considerably stronger. And while the backs and receivers still command the headlines in football — whether it’s prep, the SEC or the NFL — it’s the linemen who generally decide things.
The Big ‘Uns.
Bowling Green 38, Greenwood 8. The Purples are now 32-0 lifetime against their crosstown rival. That’s a lotta games. And this game clearly illustrated the gulf between the two programs.
BGHS coach Mark Spader and his Greenwood counterpart, William Howard, are old linemen themselves. Spader was a pulling guard for the Purples back in the day, and you can see by his build that he’s probably tossed a few opponents out of his way.
Howard, meanwhile, is a mountain of a man. He stands about 6-foot-4, with broad shoulders and a thick chest. He played his high school ball at Allen County-Scottsville before toiling as a defensive lineman at Western Kentucky University. Howard’s kind of a gentle giant, but he knows how to get his point across with adolescents.
It didn’t take long for Bowling Green to impose its will upon the Gators. A series or two, perhaps. Or a few minutes after a weather delay stopped the proceedings less than a minute into the game. With Bowling Green knocking on the Gators’ red zone.
It’s a place with which the Purples became familiar over the night.
“We came in, and we wanted to prove something to Greenwood,” BGHS senior defensive tackle Jeremiah Lightfoot said. “Coach Spader tells us all the time, ‘Winning is hard.’ Our defensive line, we’re going to play the run first. They’re a run-on-first-down kinda team. We knew what we had to do.”
According to Spader, that was contain the edge — where the Gators offense can do its most damage, in the open field — and funnel the ballcarrier into the likes of Lightfoot, veteran inside linebacker Tyler Moore and the other Bowling Green defenders.
In other words, everybody does their job.
“We played well on the edges,” Spader said.
Did they ever.
The Purples forced five Greenwood turnovers, including one for a spectacular touchdown, a 70-yard interception return for a score by BGHS defensive end Amario Wilson. The sudden score, off a James Salchli dump-off pass in the third quarter, would extend the Bowling Green lead to 24-0. The visitors’ smaller grandstand went nuts. The home side of the stadium sat in silence.
Wilson got so caught up in the moment he actually spiked the ball in the end zone.
Emphatically.
Spader obviously would have preferred that his rangy defensive end politely toss the ball to the trailing official, but deep down, he understood. The Purples had not won a football game since September 10, when they trounced Hopkinsville 38-7.
Since then, they’ve had three consecutive lopsided losses, on the road, against Boyle County, and at home, a 38-14 loss to Father Ryan, out of Nashville, before they hit a brick wall.
A brick wall in South Warren.
The second-ranked Spartans stopped the Purples 36-7, before Bowling Green’s lone open date of the season, and Spader gave his players a few days off to rest and/or recover for the stretch run to the KHSAA playoffs in November. He wanted them fresh. He said they got in a good week of practice before laying the wood to the outmanned Gators.
“We won, finally, and we were able to enjoy it,” Spader said. “As a team, we had some fun. We had to lift the weight off the shoulders of these kids. Our offensive line, and Deuce Bailey, our freshman quarterback, are growing up together. Our defense did a great job against the run.”
The Purples absolutely crushed it.
But it was Amario Wilson’s 70-yard dash to glory, the first touchdown he’d ever scored, at any level of football, that put the purr in the Purples’ engine. He was a blur on the sideline. (And the photo I took from the other side of the field …)
That’s the kind of defense that carried Bowling Green to the KHSAA Class 5A state championship last December.
“I’d never even scored a touchdown in little league, or middle school,” Wilson said when it was over. “I saw their offensive tackle go by me … He didn’t touch me. I just waited, in that pocket, and waited for the ball to come straight at me.”
Before running straight down the left sideline to demoralize the Gators one more time.
Bowling Green’s three key interior defenders — Lightfoot, Wilson and the personable Bradley Gurley, a senior thinking about playing next year at Austin Peay State University — just overwhelmed everything in their path.
“Lightfoot, he’s just a monster in the middle,” Wilson said.
The Purples’ 325-pound monster wears No. 37, usually reserved for fullbacks and corners, and can probably bench press a silo. Lightfoot also has committed to playing FCS football in the Ohio Valley Conference, at Eastern Kentucky University.
Senior running back Matrix Holcombe was the catalyst for the Bowling Green offense, rushing for 120 yards and a first-quarter touchdown. Greenwood avoided the shutout when junior linebacker Rumsey Massie sliced through a hole to bring down Holcombe in the end zone, for a fourth-quarter safety, before senior quarterback James Salchli found the Gators’ Lofton Howard for a 20-yard touchdown pass to account for the final margin.
Bowling Green (4-4 overall, 1-1 in Class 5A, 2nd District play) returns home for next Friday’s district game against Christian County. The Gators (6-2, also 1-1), meanwhile, will be traveling to tangle with second-ranked South Warren, which clobbered the same Christian County squad 51-20 on Friday night in Hopkinsville.
