JOYCE — A crucial piece of Quilcene’s offense returned from illness — and an elk hunting trip — as the Rangers remained unbeaten with a 50-8 win against Crescent.
A.J. Prater rushed 15 times for 226 yards and two TDs to power the Quilcene rushing attack.
Prater was cleared to play after a bout of mononucleosis, and after taking a previously planned elk hunting trip to Idaho (he bagged a spike).
The Rangers got rolling after a scoreless first quarter in which each team unable to come away with points after time-consuming drives.
“Shoot, Crescent’s tough,” Quilcene coach Byron Wilson said. “They are so much better than last year.
“I think our kids thought, ‘Oh, we’re playing Crescent,’ and it’s a road trip and all, so it took them slapping us in the nose a few times, and then they said, ‘Well, wait a minute, we have to get it going here.’
“Like I told the kids, we run a multiple offense and we knew they had scouted our option offense, so boom, we went back to our base offense and went from there.”
Prater got it going, rolling untouched up the middle for a 67-yard score with 10:43 to go in the second quarter.
“Our blockers did great, and I had huge holes to run through all day,” Prater said.
“That one was so wide, I just hit it and kept going.”
Loggers coach Brian Shimko felt many of his team’s breakdowns were self-inflicted.
“We mostly beat ourselves this game,” Shimko said.
“We moved the ball pretty well, and in first quarter it was a good game, then they got on us after that.
“We were fighting back and forth in the first quarter with them, and that first touchdown kind of brought us down and we weren’t able to get back up.
“And there were a lot of penalties in that game, and some that wiped out some really good plays by our guys.”
The Rangers quickly scored again when quarterback Eli Harrison rolled right and found Jarod Smith for a 20-yard touchdown pass.
On their next drive the Loggers again moved the ball against the Quilcene defense but stalled out and turned the ball over on downs.
Harrison then found Ace Elkins all alone on a perfectly executed wheel route for a 40-yard touchdown and a 22-0 halftime lead.
Crescent tried an onside kick to open the second half with disastrous results.
Prater scooped up the ball and broke right, running for 45 yards and setting up the Rangers at the Loggers’ 15-yard line.
Ace Elkins then scored on a 15-yard run.
Quilcene squibbed its kickoff, recovering the ball and driving for a 10-yard rushing score by Prater as the lead ballooned to 36-0.
The Loggers kept moving the ball but still couldn’t find the end zone, and two drives ended in interceptions by Harrison.
An All-State defensive back last season, Harrison has seven picks against Crescent in the last two seasons.
“I credit [assistant] coach [Trey] Beathard’s defense,” Wilson said. “That defense bends but doesn’t break.
“He can adjust things around on the important plays and it makes it tough to handle for an offense.”
The Loggers finally broke through and put points on the board late in the game.
Following a 70-yard TD run from Quilcene reserve Olin Reynolds, Wyatt McNeece, a 6-foot-3, 270-pound lineman, grabbed the squib kick and took off, rolling 65 yards to paydirt.
“I’m an offensive linemen, man, that was my dream right there,” McNeece said.
“I got great blocking from the kick return team.”
There was more to the score than just six points, at least according to McNeece and his teammates.
“Wyatt made a deal with all the coaches that if he returned a kick for a touchdown we would have to shave his number [22] on our heads,” Shimko said.
“So he was really happy about that. But none of us coaches shook [hands] with him on it, so I don’t know if that’s going to happen.
“He made the deal; we didn’t agree to it. But he was pretty excited about it when he came back to the sideline.”
Quilcene (3-0) visits Rainier Christian in its SeaTac League opener this Friday.
Crescent (2-2) hosts Tulalip Heritage in its Northwest Football League opener this Saturday.
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Sports reporter Michael Carman can be contacted at 360-452-2345, ext. 5250 or at mcarman@peninsuladailynews.com.
