Mayflower finds form after defeat
MAYFLOWER 37, BAPTIST PREP 0
Mayflower Coach Austin Emerson likes what he’s seeing from his Eagles as the regular season winds down.
Two weeks after losing to Glen Rose, the Eagles (61, 3-1 4-3A Conference) have responded with consecutive shutouts, including 37-0 over Baptist Prep on Friday night in Little Rock.
“We had a great week of prep for this game, and we need to take that going into Atkins next week,’’ Emerson said.
Atkins and Mayflower are tied for second in the 4-3A Conference.
“We got exposed against Glen Rose, so we have to figure out what we are screwing up, what we are doing wrong, so we are trying to fix all of that going into the playoffs.”
It also helped to have a healthy Deon Simmons, who missed some early season games because of an injury. Simmons, a 5-6, 165-pound senior, scored four touchdowns to lead the Eagles over Baptist Prep (3-3-1, 2-2).
“He’s a great kid,’’ Emerson said. “He just keeps getting better every week.”
Simmons had touchdowns on a pair of 6-yard runs to open the scoring, and busted the game open with a 55-yard interception TD return. He also ran in the final score, a 64-yarder with 6:54 left, and had three two-point conversions.
For the game, he finished with 150 yards on 15 carries and caught 4 passes for 24 yards. He also had a 31-yard punt return.
Quarterback Dalton Muse was 13-of-16 passing for 195 yards and a touchdown.
“We started executing on some stuff we have been working on a lot,’’ Emerson said. “We are finally starting to run our base stuff really, really well.
“We won some games a lot on who we have, but we haven’t executed our stuff really well. So we’ve really concentrated on our base stuff, trying hard to do our main offense really, really well.”
Dylan Burnett led the defense with four tackles for loss, two of them quarterback sacks. Drake Wilkerson had a fumble recovery.