By Lonnie Turner
The Chapman Panthers don’t show a lot about their football players anywhere other than their scores and they do put a heap of points on the board! Wonder if they keep the starting offense in the games…every game? The Wildcats won’t score 50 points in a game unless Coach Jackie Hayes has had a bad coaching day and the opponent wants to talk a lot of trash about what they are going to do to his team on game day.
The game in Columbia this coming Saturday at 3 o’clock can answer a lot of questions about both teams. The Panthers have scored 739 points this season and has allowed only 259, compared to Dillon’s totals of 571 scored and 142 points against. Looks like Chapman will score a lot of points, and if Dillon’s starters had stayed in every game, they possibly would have had a whole lot more than 571 points. That calculates out to nearly 53 points a game for Chapman, again compared to 41 for the Wildcats…man that’s a lot of offense, but check out the defense. Chapman is giving up 18 points a game to 11 for the Cats, so it could very well be one of those barn-burners…like last year. Anyway the game is going to be televised by the South Carolina High School League, but don’t know which local channel will show it in our area, but hopefully you can take off over to Columbia and watch every minute live without interference.
Chapman head coach Mark Hodge said that they had improved throughout the year on defense and he thinks whichever defense plays the best will win the game! Coach Hayes commented that he feels like they have gotten every bit out of his player that they can and he thinks the Cats are a little bit better on that level than the Cats were a year ago!
They Cats will take off sometime early Saturday morning for the trip to Columbia and will probably try to take some alternate way to miss the construction on I-20, but that decision hasn’t been made public.
Advance tickets are on sale through Friday at the Dillon High School office for $10 each, if interested. It’ll save a lot of time at the gates at Williams-Brice!
