I knew that the Friday, Oct. 2, Plant City-Tampa Bay Tech game was over in the second half once the Raiders’ offense started scoring and Quay Brooks began rap battling any teammates within earshot. When everyone else on the sideline is having fun, you’re having fun too.
Sure, the first half was a little dull for those in attendance. It was the first time I’ve ever pointed my camera at a student section and gotten zero response. Perhaps, in that moment, I became the only person to get shut down worse than the Titans did all night.
But I can’t totally blame them. If you’ve ever looked at a box score that read, “HALFTIME: 3-0,” and thought, “Wow, this is a good game,” then you must be a defensive coordinator somewhere. For the rest of us, watching two offenses sputter and come up short isn’t exactly watching a classic.
I did predict that it would be a classic in last week’s Gridiron Report, so I have to admit that I was wrong. But, if we’re going by the second-half performance, who cares? Plant City woke up and looked like Plant City again, and it was fun to watch.
I wanted to see if Corey King could bounce back from a less-than-stellar passing performance with a strong one against Tech, or at least an efficient one, and 6-for-11 with 74 yards is OK. It was nice to see T.J. Chase haul in a few passes, and King did complete passes to four different receivers.
But King didn’t really need to throw the ball to get the win. That’s fine when you’re athletic enough to pick up 112 yards on 12 carries and find the end zone once. Or running some solid fakeries with help from a 182-yard, one-touchdown performance by Markese Hargrove. As we’ve seen, mobile quarterbacks can succeed in this district.
To give you an idea of just how much chaos this defense caused, let’s pull up the most basic numbers: Tech finished with 67 rushing yards, three passing yards and three interceptions thrown. I know the first half was close, but you have to have the dumbest luck in the history of Earth to win a football game in which you have as many picks thrown as you do passing yards. Or, maybe you just have to play against UCF.
Friday also brought a first for me. I went to PCHS earlier in the week to speak about my job to Jennifer Hamilton’s journalism class, and I had two of those students shadow me at the football game. I’d never done either of those things before.
I always love to see students who are passionate about journalism, especially when they’re getting into it at an earlier age than I did. And you know when someone’s really into it when, at their first-ever game on the sideline, they come within inches of getting knocked into next week by a flying T.J. Chase and still want to keep shooting photos from inside the white paint lines.
It was also nice to not only teach about football, but to see how their photographs progressed throughout the game. We published their photos and thoughts on the experience in the Raider Review section of our website, and I’m already looking forward to working with more PCHS students in the future. Just remember, aspiring journalists: if you’re covering sports, always keep your head on a swivel.