Lakeside claimed the 5A-South junior high football title outright Thursday night as it rolled to a 39-12 win over Little Rock McClellan at Chick Austin Stadium.
Although the score implies a one-sided game, junior Rams head coach Lewis Jolly said it was much closer than it appears.
"We knew McClellan was going to give us a game," he said. "The end score doesn't reflect how close this game was for us. I was nervous.
"When we missed that extra point, I got really nervous because we were giving them a little bit of breathing room. You saw long kickoffs. Any time they touched the ball, they were a threat to score."
Lakeside (8-1, 8-0) took advantage of three encroachment penalties by the junior Crimson Lions (5-3) after getting backed up early in its initial drive, but the junior Rams were unable to do anything with its first drive, punting the ball away three minutes into the game.
McClellan could not find forward progress in its first drive, kicking it away four plays later after just two minutes with the ball.
"They are exactly what we thought they were going to be: A super-physical team that plays hard and that could just run at every position," Jolly said.
"They came out the first half, played super-aggressive, gave us fits up front on offense and did some things we didn't see on film. We went back into halftime, adjusted to it. I thought the kids adjusted well. We put some stuff on them to make some checks on the fly. For junior high kids to do that in the second half is a really big deal for us."
It was the junior Rams that found the end zone first, Jordan Mills finding Chase Cross on a six-yard pass with 6:27 left in the first half, and Andrew Degrasse split the uprights for the point-after.
Four plays later, the score was 7-6 after quarterback Malachi McKenzie broke free for a 34-yard touchdown run with 4:32 left in the period, but the conversion play failed.
Lakeside managed to take a 14-6 lead into the break after Mills found Pierce Smalley on a 38-yard pass to put the junior Rams at the edge of the end zone with another Mills-Smalley connection for the score with 1:50 left in the half.
The junior Rams were able to take a 21-6 lead before Jamarcus Brown had an 85-yard kickoff return to pull McClellan within 21-12.
"I thought our kids played hard," said McClellan head coach Marcus Moody. "We had a couple of balls that didn't bounce our way, but I thought we played hard for the most part. We gave everything we had. We just went up a better opponent. They were better tonight."
Noah Duvall did the majority of the legwork for Lakeside, rushing for 96 yards and three touchdowns.
"What a team player he's always been," Jolly said. "He's as solid as you come as a kid, a great attitude about him, a great team leader. ... He kind of lives in the shadow of his brother, Issac Echols that plays high school and does real good, and he doesn't shy from it.
"He just does his thing. He's his own person, at the school and on the field. It doesn't matter what you ask him to do; he'll do it, offense, defense, special teams. He'll do anything. If we asked him to go play guard, he'd go play guard for us because he's that kind of unselfish kid for us."
Smalley made three catches for 76 yards and a touchdown while rushing three times for six yards. Mills was 8-for-14 passing for 184 yards with two touchdowns, and Brock Garner had two catches for 52 yards.
"I thought our kids played real well," Jolly said. "We ran a real different style of defense tonight that we haven't run all year to counteract some of the stuff we thought they'd do, and the kids adapted well to it. A lot of moving parts to it, a whole new way of doing things tonight, and they responded well. I'm very proud of them.
"Their goal was to be conference champs. That's the first thing we asked them, what they wanted to achieve, and they said, 'We want to be conference champs.' And they are. It's a great bunch. To have two classes back to back, being able to coach these kids two years. ... It's very, very exciting to be part of Lakeside football. The future is bright."
Sports on 10/27/2018