KINGWOOD — It’s awfully tough to a win a football game without scoring.
It’s even tougher to win without moving the ball.
Despite all those hurdles, the Preston High School football team found itself right in the middle of a defensive battle on Friday night. The Knights (0-2) trailed visiting North Marion, 14-10 at halftime, thanks to a stingy defense and an opportunistic offense.
Unfortunately, the Knights’ defense just ran out of gas as the Huskies (2-0) left Kingwood with a 34-10 victory.
“Defensively, I thought we played our rears off,” second-year head coach Mark Deep said. “They are a good football team, and they are going to make plays. But we played tough defense and basically gave up two plays in the first half.”
One of those plays was the first touchdown by the Huskies. Quarterback Casey Minor had the ball snapped over his head and he then retreated to the right side of the field before reversing course and scoring on a 10-yard run that likely took 50 yards to complete.
North Marion appeared to get things settled offensively with 6:41 left in the third quarter when the Huskies drove 75 yards in just five plays and finished with a 7-yard run by Gavan Lemley to take a 14-0 lead. The big play on that drive came when Minor found tight end Harley Sickles for a 49-yard strike.
Preston did respond this time with its biggest play of the night as Ethan Likens took a counter handoff and ran 55 yards straight through the Huskies’ defense to cut the score to 14-7.
The Knights finished off their scoring when Cole Turner connected on a 35-yard field goal that was set up by an interception.
While Deep and the Knights were happy with the way the first half went, North Marion head coach Daran Hays was anything but happy.
“I probably pushed the panic button,” Hays said. “I wanted to just play defense, play keep away and try to maybe one more score on the board in the second half. The coaches talked me into letting Casey play and he rebounded really well.”
Minor certainly found something in the second half as he tossed a pair of touchdowns and added another touchdown run to finish with four total scores in the contest. He also threw for 224 yards.
While the Huskies were able to find some offense, the Knights struggled to put together any offense all night. They finished with just 113 total yards and 55 of those came on the run by Likens. Preston had just four first downs in the contest and two of those came in the final minute of the game against the North Marion reserves.
“I am happy defensively with where we are at,” Deep said. “We need to get a little more offensive production. It’s all about execution. It comes down to executing play, hitting the right hole, making the right blocks. We will go watch film and try to execute better next week.”
Hays also said he was happy with how his defense played and how his offense responded after the rough first half. North Marion finished with 319 total yards of offense in the contest.
“Our defense saved our rear end,” Hays said. “We struggled on about every side of the ball but that one. We knew we are a pretty good defensive team, but we can’t put ourselves in that position.”
Preston returns to action on Friday when it hosts Fairmont Senior at 7 p.m.
By ERIC HERTER
