Here is a photo gallery from Dillon’s win over Marion on Thursday night.
PhOTO GALLERY
Photos by Johnnie Daniels/The Dillon Herald
Click once on a photo to bring it into a single screen, and then again to enlarge.
By Lonnie Turner
How many yards in a mile, you ask? When I was in grade school, Miss Margaret Goodyear taught me there were 5,280 feet or 1,760 yards in a mile. Now consider the great game of football played on a grid, which is 100 yards or 300 feet long. Now, with those dimensions in mind, on Thursday, the Dillon Wildcats reeled off 390 yards on the ground, 263 through the air, and another 47 in returns for a grand total of 700 yards. That’s just 180 yards shy of half a mile, but wait! Marion had 205 yards in total offense, plus another 142 in returns, giving their team 347 net yardage for the night, which means there were 1,047 combined yards gained. We’re talking about over a half mile of running up and down the field, not to mention the 192 yards in penalties. No sir, I never thought I’d think about modern math when it came to football on Friday (or Thursday) nights on the local gridirons. Now, with all the arithmetic taken care of, Tyquan King scored two touchdowns on runs of one and fifteen yards on the way to a 140 yard rushing performance to lead the Cats on the ground and five other offensive players scored a touchdown apiece, four rushing and three more through the air.
Even though Jay Lester threw two interceptions deep in Marion territory, the junior completed 18 of 21 for over 200 yards to push his season’s total to 1,313 yards and 12 touchdowns. There we go again, with all these numbers, but in this case they are important numbers. The Wildcats scored the first two times on offense, with King scoring first. Just three minutes later, Lester hit Justin Green for a 17-yard score and a two point conversion pass from Lester to Green to give the Cats a 14-6 lead.
Marion had tied the game within a minute of King’s TD run, but the point after was no good when running back TyQuan Covington failed to get into the end zone.
The Wildcats scored a third TD in the waning minutes of the first quarter on a six-yard run by Nemo Squires and King was successful with another run for the two-point conversion and a 22-6 lead with 1:52 left in the quarter.
Fourteen more points were put on the scoreboard in the second 12 minutes of play with the first coming after a fake punt gave the Cats the ball at the Dillon 43. Lester was perfect with an over the middle strike to Quashod Singleton with just 18 seconds gone in the quarter for a 20-yard scoring pass. This time, Malachi Bember was perfect with his first of two PAT kicks.
Still another scoring threat went by the wayside when the Cats fumbled the ball away into the end-zone after a 85 yard drive in ten plays and Covington picked off Lester on the opening play of the next Dillon offensive drive and returned it 51 yards to the Dillon 16. Two false starts, a fumble and a blocked 34-yard field goal attempt gave the ball back to the Wildcats and on the first play Lester ran 31 yards for a first down at the Marion 45. Two plays later King was in the end zone for a 15-yard touchdown and the kick by Bember gave the Cats a 36-6 just before the half.
There was not much let up going into the second half. After holding Marion to three and out, the Cats put together a 70-yard drive in 12 plays with Corrian Wright running in the final 20 yards for a 42-6 bulge. The Wildcats would score another touchdown on the first play of the fourth quarter with Lester hitting newcomer Wy’Khale McGill with a 5-yard over the middle and Bember made it, 49-6 with his third kick of the night.
For the defense, Shaeki Jeanty, Roy Covington and Jadarius McDaniel recorded quarterback sacks with Covington getting to one of the Foxes five quarterbacks twice and Jeanty getting 1-1/2 and Shamar McCollum helped Jeanty with half a sack. McDaniel and Joseph Burns had 6 tackles apiece to lead the tackle sheets.
