In the 87th meeting between the Rockdale Tigers and Taylor Ducks, it was the Tigers that came out on top. It started out as a close game, with the Ducks responding to both of Rockdale’s first two touchdown’s, but RHS built a stable 28-14 lead at half time and held on for the remainder of the game to win, 44-27.
In order to help his team get their first win of the season, Campsey had the task of outsmarting Taylor head coach Brandon Houston, his former Rockdale colleague who was the offensive coordinator on the 2017 Tiger state championship team.
“It was what we thought it would be,” said RHS head coach Jacob Campsey. “(Taylor is) so well-coached offensively that they’re going to do some stuff we haven’t seen before or put us in some bad spots.”
“Huey does that as well as anybody in the world and we knew that was going to be the case,” he said.
Campsey also said he was proud of the game his team played, especially against a school that has more than double the enrollment of Rockdale High School.
“They have some tremendous athletes,” he said. “They’re so well-coached and just the sheer numbers. We’re be playing 10 kids on both sides of the ball and they have a bunch of different players and you saw that late.”
The second-year head coach also described the first two weeks of his team’s season, which has asked his young squad to go up against bigger teams.
“It really gets us a lot of practice in playing,” Campsey said. “Because we have so many guys playing both ways and we’re having to play against guys who are fresh.”
“You have to dig down and find something that you don’t have...playing a team that can play a lot of kids is always good for us early,” he said.
GAME STORY—The game started off as a battle between defenses, with both teams stopping each other on their first drives.
Things changed on Rockdale’s second drive when Blayden Barcak scored his first of three rushing touchdowns on a 15-yard quarterback sweep to the right with 4:30 left to play in the first. Daniel Romero made the extra point to put Rockdale up 7-0.
Taylor answered back in the final seconds of the opening quarter after a barely converted first down by the Ducks led to Connor Cobb getting loose on a post pattern to take a pass from Josh Mikulencak up the middle for a 50-yard TD. Jarvis Anderson made the PAT to tie the game at seven.
The same thing happened in the second, with Rockdale scoring on a Barcak run less than two minutes into the quarter and Taylor’s Anderson breaking away for a 65-yard touchdown on the first play of their possession to tie the game again, this time at 14.
Rockdale moved right back ahead when sophomore Wyatt Windham returned the kickoff for 50-yards. Daniel
Romero’s PAT made it 21-14 with 9:59 left in the half. However, Taylor didn’t reply or even score for the remainder of the half.
Rockdale built on their lead towards the end of the half when Robert Owens scored his first touchdown of the night after Barcak found him open for a 27-yard TD. Romero’s PAT made it 28-14 at halftime.
Owens scored again in the third to improve Rockdale’s lead to 35-14 when he ran back a kickoff return for 75 yards.
Although the Ducks scored two more touchdowns, so did RHS, helping them secure their first win of the year, 44-27.
Barcak completed 10 of 13 with 189 yards and rushed for 114 yards on 10 carries. Owens, Windham and Kobe Mitchell led the team in receiving with a combined total of 189 yards on nine catches.
LEXINGTON—After two weeks of taking on schools with more students than Rockdale High School, the Tigers are scheduled to face Class 3A-II Lexington.
Picked to finish second in District 13-3A-II and coming off a regional semi-final appearance in 2020, the Eagles are hoping to make another deep run especially with senior Jared Kerr, a Texas A&M commit, that rushed for 1,095 yards during his junior year and also had 424 receiving yards.
LHS also has Sheldon Springer, who is in his third year as their starting quarterback and finished 2020 with 1,589 passing yards.
Lexington started their season off rough with a loss to Class 3A-I West 48-7 on the road but bounced back with a 38-34 win over Thrall in a game the Eagles led by at least two touchdowns for much of the night.
Campsey said the game will be a change of pace after playing two straight weeks of teams with a lot of depth to playing Lexington, which had less than half the enrollment of La Grange and has close to a third of the enrollment of Taylor.
“It’s going to be a similar type of game between us,” Campsey said. “A bunch of kids playing both ways and it’s just (going to be) a small school dog fight.”
Game time is at 7:30 p.m. at Tiger Stadium.
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