Sistrunk-led Bruins wear down Ringgold
Two-a-days. Running. Conditioning drills.
The players might not like them, but there’s a method to the madness.
In the second half of Friday’s season opening game between Northwest Whitfield High School and the visiting Ringgold Tigers, one thing was abundantly clear. The host Bruins were the more conditioned team and it paid off in a 48-29 victory.
Behind an offensive line that physically wore down Ringgold, Northwest running back Dominique Sistrunk piled up 271 yards rushing on 23 carries — nearly 200 of which came in the second half. Also, four of Sistrunk’s five touchdown runs came after Ringgold grabbed a 29-22 lead early in the third quarter.
After the game, he recognized the importance of the guys in front of him paving the way.
“I can’t do it without my O-line,” said the 6-foot-2, 240-pound Sistrunk. “That’s the main thing, I have to run behind them. Without them I wouldn’t be anything.”
Sistrunk’s unofficial total of 271 yards left him four shy of the school record he set last year against Pickens.
On the opposite sideline, Ringgold coach Robert Akins admitted he didn’t have his team in the shape it needs to be in. On five occasions, including one stretch of four straight plays, a Tiger went down with cramping issues.
“We’re playing a lot of kids both ways, we got to get in better shape,” Akins said. “Even the kids who aren’t playing both ways, they weren’t in very good shape. A
lot of that has to do, we practice two-anda-half hours, you can’t run conditioning after a two-and-a-half hour practice. So we try to get it done during practice, but I haven’t done a very good job. That’s all on me. Hopefully in the net couple weeks we’ll get better with that.”
The first half Friday was a shootout as the lead changed hands four times.
After Ringgold built a 12-0 lead off a pair of touchdown passes from Cole Kibler to Dylan Wright from a yard out, and to Pete Brower from 24 yards out, Northwest answered with touchdown runs of 8 and 80 yards from Luke Shiflett.
Sistrunk scored his first touchdown, a 34yard burst in the second quarter, but the Bruins needed a 38-yard field goal from Vicente Vaca to go into the locker room tied at 22.
Shiflett finished the game with 144 yards on the ground while passing for another 130. His counterpart, Kibler threw for a reported 488 yards and four touchdowns in a losing cause.
Ringgold intercepted Northwest on the first drive of the second half, and one play later Kibler hit Brower on a 30-yard touchdown pass. The extra point put the Tigers up 29-22.
But doubt never crept in on the Bruins’ sideline
“I went off,” Sistrunk said in regards to the second half. “I knew once I got the ball and kept on going, kept on going, they weren’t going to stop me.”
For offensive lineman Brett Norris and his partners on the Northwest line, seeing Sistrunk running free on a 75-yard touchdown on his final rush of the night meant it was job well done.
“It feels good because that means we did our job right,” Norris said. “We protected our QB and our running back.”
The Tigers (0-1) will have to regroup quickly as they get set to drive up the road to Heritage next Friday night to face the 1-0 Generals.
“The whole game we made too many mistakes,” Akins added. “We talked to our kids about stupid mental mistakes. We had a lot of personal fouls, a lot of disciplinetype mistakes. I think that proved to be the difference, plus, they were just more physical than us the second half. They started running zone and kick and trap. We thought we could hang in their with them and we just couldn’t do it.”