Immediately following the West Point High School football team’s 44-0 victory against New Hope on Friday night, Jeffrey Drake had his mind on Oxford High.
Never mind next week’s regular-season finale against Lewisburg, or whichever opponents the Green Wave will face in the Mississippi High School Activities Association Class 5A playoffs before a potential rematch against its division rival. Forget that the Chargers spanked the Green Wave 50-28 earlier this season. Nah, Drake and his Green Wave teammates are riding a high of back-to-back shutouts, games in which they’ve scored three defensive touchdowns.
“We comin’, Oxford,” Drake said. “We’re ready.”
Drake had one of two interception returns for a touchdown off Thomas Stevens, scoring from 24 yards in the second quarter to give the Green Wave a 28-0 halftime lead. Trevino Harris returned an interception in the third quarter to ice the game and cap a dominant performance in which West Point allowed four first downs and 58 yards of offense.
“We’re not done yet,” Drake said. “We’ve got a whole lot of work to do when we get back to school. We still have to work on tackling and keep reading the quarterback.”
West Point (8-2, 5-1 Class 5A, Region 1) beat Saltillo 50-0 last week and has won five-straight games. The Green Wave have scored more than 44 points and have given up an average of 10 points per game.
The performance of the front seven, particularly the defensive line, has been a major reason for the dominance on defense. Everett Cunningham and William Ivy wreaked havoc in the middle and opened lanes on the edges for Tony Rush, Terrence Cherry, and Tae Hampton for a defense that had five sacks.
The defense also forced a safety when Stevens was penalized for intentional grounding on third down from the Trojans’ 3-yard-line in the third quarter.
“We want to play fast,” West Point coach Chris Chambless said. “That’s something we wanted to do in the offseason — get better up front and play faster and get better on the back end. It starts at the line of scrimmage. We were able to do that.
“We were able to get up early, keep the lead. Those picks were huge for us on defense. I told the guys that whoever makes the plays first and gets the adrenaline going, in games like this, against New Hope, against a rival … they made a play last year on us and got going, and that’s what we did tonight.”
The safety marked back-to-back possessions in which New Hope’s defense produced stops in its red zone to keep West Point off the scoreboard. But much like the first that resulted in a safety, the second would prove disastrous, too, when Harris intercepted Stevens and took it to the house.
“We felt like we’d be able to dominate their whole offense,” Ivy said.
New Hope coach Kris Pickle said he was proud of his team’s defensive effort, and while disappointed with the Trojans’ lack of execution on offense, he said the disparity in size and strength up front made it difficult for the Trojans to mount drives.
“We couldn’t block them,” Pickle said. “It doesn’t matter how good you are or what scheme you got. If you can’t block them, you can’t do anything. When that happens, you’re in for a long night on offense. We were getting whipped in one-on-one battles. They twist a little bit, but we’d worked on that all week long. They pretty much lined up and play and out-tough you, and that’s what they did to us. It just comes down to strength, and they’re a little bit bigger and stronger.”
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