News-Times Staff
JUNCTION CITY - After inclement weather forced a postponement last week, Junction City was able to take the field for their annual Purple & Gold game on Tuesday night with the Gold coming away with a 21-14 win.
Hishmma Taylor scored on touchdown runs of 31 and 26 yards for the Gold with the latter touchdown breaking a 14-all tie.
“We split up our team completely even, so we didn’t go first offense against second defense. We divided them right in half,” said Junction City coach Steven Jones. “Overall, everybody moved around really well. It was a really back-and-forth scrimmage.”
Dhante Gibson opened the scoring with a 1-yard run before Taylor answered with the first of his two scores.
The Gold then took the lead thanks to a 12-yard strike from Brady Hutcheson to Jakobe Fisher.
However, the Purple answered on Shuvasceiaye Frazier’s 12-yard run to tie the game, but Taylor’s second touchdown proved to be the difference.
One aspect that the coaching staff was pleased with was with the play of the offensive line.
“We threw a bunch of different people out there, and all of them did a pretty good job on both sides of the ball,” said assistant coach Justin Thompson, who handles the offensive and defensive lines.
Thompson singled out the play of Cody Adkins, Noreaga Frazier and Trey Miner for their blocking, but added there is plenty of room for improvement.
“It’s still a work in progress, but the good thing is we’ve got a bunch of guys that can step in there and do it, and that gives us a little bit of depth,” Thompson said. “There were some mental mistakes and things like that, but there weren’t a lot of effort mistakes, which makes it easier to fix.”
For Jones, Tuesday was the first opportunity to see if any of the Dragons’ underclassmen will have an opportunity to help out the varsity squad this season.
“The big thing is seeing those young guys that are coming off of junior high from last year and seeing those 10th-graders and what they can do,” Jones said. “If some of them can help us on Friday nights, we want to find that out at this point.”
Tempo on offense has been a focal point for the Dragons, and Jones indicated that he would like his team to play faster.
“We’ve got to speed it up a little bit more,” Jones said. “With splitting it the way that we did, we didn’t necessarily have guys that have really worked together a lot on the same unit, so we really didn’t get to go as fast as we wanted, but overall, I was pleased with how they moved around. We’ve just got to speed up the tempo a little bit.”
The Dragons will have a scrimmage at Harmony Grove next week, and Jones said he will be focusing on special teams.
“We’re going to hit special teams pretty hard over the next couple of days,” Jones said. “We didn’t do anything in the scrimmage on special teams. We just went offense against defense, so we’ll hit special teams.”