GALION, Ohio – The quest for the Mid Ohio Athletic Conference Red Division title got a little more interesting thanks to the Galion football team, which celebrated Homecoming by taking down River Valley on Friday night at Unckrich Stadium.
Despite trailing at the half, the Tigers roared in the third quarter, scoring three touchdowns and powering their way to a 38-21 win over the Vikings.
“When you’re talking about two heavyweights going at each other, we got knocked down – they knocked us to the canvas and even bloodied our mouth,” Galion coach Chris Hawkins said. “But we talked about it at halftime, when you don’t knock a championship-caliber team out, they’ve got the chance to come back.
“And that’s exactly what happened.”
Senior running back Drake Barnett led the way in the second half, scoring three Galion (5-2, 2-2 MOAC) touchdowns.
“Like champions do, instead of laying on the canvas for a 10-count, we got our butts back up, wiped our mouth off and came out swinging – that’s what champions do,” Hawkins said. “That was one of the best halves of football that I’ve ever been involved in.”
Barnett scored on runs of 1, 13, and 3 yards. Quarterback Chase Cooke also was instrumental in the offensive attack as a change of pace from Jacob Fryer.
VIKINGS START FAST: River Valley (5-2, 3-1 MOAC) came out of the gate with purpose, taking a quick 21-7 lead in the first half.
Carson Parsell and Jax Harville did majority of the damage for the Vikings. Each had TD runs, and Harville also connected with Parsell on a 41-yard bomb for a score.
“In the first half, we did pretty much what we wanted to do, which is what we didn’t do in the second half,” River Valley coach Doug Green said. “We got ourselves in very good field position, and we started drives with our offense in good field position and were able to hold their offense down a little bit.”
Green added that his defense was in bad field position in the latter stages of the game – something he said his team can’t afford to do.
“They came out in the second half and ran the ball on us, and we weren’t able to run the ball. We couldn’t flip the field and weren’t able to convert when we had to,” he said.
PACING THE TIGERS: In addition to big nights from Barnett and Cooke, Galion also received key contributions from Fryer and the defensive line.
Fryer, who split time between QB and receiver, managed a 4-yard scamper for the Tigers’ first score of the night and caught a 16-yard touchdown pass from Cooke to pull the Tigers within 7 points at halftime. Fryer also grabbed an interception.
Defensively, the Tigers sacked Harville three times, with one each coming from Bobby Gilbert, Zach Throckmorton, and Isaiah Davis. Ryan Talbott also nabbed an interception for Galion, while the defensive line recorded six pass deflections – four of which came on River Valley’s last drive.
“The thing that’s kind of nice to see is that we had some deficiencies, and we really worked hard the last two weeks and even more this week,” Hawkins said of his defense. “Our open-field tackling against Marion Harding [last week] was atrocious, so we really made a commitment – it’s still not great, but it was a lot better than it was against Harding.”
