Tigers begin NCC play at Upper Sandusky

By JON KLEINKNECHT

Inquirer Sports Editor

sports@galioninquirer.com

North Cen­tral Con­fer­ence play begins Fri­day with the Tigers mak­ing a road trip to long-time foe Upper Sandusky.

Galion is fresh off con­vinc­ing 46–28 drub­bing of Key­stone last week, while the Rams spanked Mohawk 38–13. The Orange-and-Blue and Upper San­dusky both went 2–1 in the non-conference por­tion of their schedules.

In what has been a back-and-forth series as far as dom­i­na­tion is con­cerned, the Tigers have beaten the Rams 37 times, lost 33 and tied with them once. Galion has won the last three meet­ings, includ­ing last year’s in Tiger­town by a 47–14 mar­gin. Upper San­dusky rat­tled off eight wins in a row against the Orange-and-Blue from 2001-08.

“He’s their best foot­ball player, period,” said Galion head coach Chris Hawkins when asked about Upper San­dusky quar­ter­back Tylor Pritchard. “He’s a big, thick kid with good speed. He’s the per­son we need to stop.”

He sure is.

The Rams enter Fri­day night’s bat­tle aver­ag­ing 27 points a game and yield­ing a norm of 20. Pritchard has pro­vided the major­ity of their offense. The stand­out has com­pleted 41-of-68 passes (60.3$) for 443 yards, 3 touch­downs and has been inter­cepted 3 times.

When run­ning the ball, Pritchard has amassed 280 yards on 49 car­ries, an aver­age of 5.7 yards per attempt. He’s scored 6 touch­downs and a 2-point conversion.

“They are run­ning a lot of our stuff,” Hawkins men­tioned. “They are a true spread team. In his (Pritchard’s) case, we want him to give the ball all the time. We’re gonna try to limit his rushes as much as possible.”

Other key per­former in the first three weeks for Upper San­dusky have been run­ning­back Don­ald Barth and wide receiver Tris­tan Reichelder­fer. Barth has 137 yards rush­ing on just 15 car­ries, a norm of 9.1 stripes per try. He’s also caught 12 passes for a team-best 150 yards and a six-pointer.

Reichelder­fer also has a dozen pass recep­tions that total 126 yards.

When it comes to defense, the Rams won’t be doing any­thing the Tigers haven’t seen plenty of so far.

“They’re the fourth 4–3 team we have focused,” stated Hawkins. “They will have a hodge­podge of coverages.”

Although the Tigers are aver­ag­ing 38.3 points a game — just 5 per out­ing behind last year’s high­est scor­ing squad in school his­tory — Hawkins said there is plenty of room for improvement.

“We’re not as good offen­sively in week 4 as we were last year,” the sixth-year Galion head coach men­tioned. “We need to get bet­ter. I told the guys we’re under-achieving on that side of the ball. We’re mak­ing too many mistakes.”

The Orange-and-Blue were slapped with more than 100 yards in penal­ties in last week’s victory.

“Some penal­ties you can live with,” Hawkins said. “The silly penal­ties away from the ball, that’s what we have to get rid of. We’ve gotta be more con­sis­tent. You typ­i­cally only run 50–55 plays a game and you can’t afford hav­ing penal­ties 20–25 per­cent of the time. Not only do you lose the penalty yards, you also lose yards gained.”

Defen­sively, Galion yields 16.3 points a Fri­day night. That num­ber is deceiv­ing. Twenty of the 28 points the Orange-and-Blue gave up to Key­stone last week were scored against the Tiger reserves.

“We need to cre­ate more turnovers,” Hawkins matter-of-factly said. “I believe we’re an aver­age offense that can be great, and I believe we’re an above-average defense that can be great.”

Kick­off is at 7 p.m.

Posted by Jon Kleinknecht on Sep 11 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.