Published: September 07, 2008 01:31 am            

Could’ve, Should’ve

Cavaliers quarterback gives Hornets fits in season-opening loss Saturday night

SHENANDOAH — Senior cornerback James Davidson didn’t want to hear any talk about a moral victory. Huntsville lost Saturday, plain and simple.

It’s true, the Hornets had plenty of chances to beat College Park in its inaugural game at the brand-new Woodforest Bank Stadium, but they could not pull off the upset.

Huntsville failed on four consecutive extra-point attempts, three of which were 2-point tries. The Hornets rarely stopped College Park quarterback Taylor Parsons, especially when it mattered most. And finally, Huntsville narrowly missed a 40-yard field goal with 12 seconds left that would have sent the game into overtime.

That’s why Huntsville lost to the Cavaliers 27-24. And nothing about it felt good to Davidson, his teammates or his coaches.

“This is a new Hornet system. We don’t want to make it close anymore. We want to win,” said Davidson, who tried like crazy to slow down Parsons and the Cavaliers’ option offense, but could not.

Parsons rushed for 249 yards and three touchdowns Saturday. He also set up the game-winning score by engineering a quick 72-yard late in the fourth quarter. The savvy young quarterback ripped off runs of 31 and 33 yards to set up Paco Solano’s go-ahead score with 3:51 left in the game.

“The better team won today,” Davidson added. “We fought back, and now all we can do is go back to the drawing board and get ready for the next game.”

That’s what the Hornets need to do, but they can do so knowing they went on the road and had a talented Class 5A team on the ropes. A play here, a wiser decision there, and it would have been Huntsville celebrating a thrilling season-opening victory, not the Cavaliers who improved to 2-0 with Saturday’s win.

“We would have liked to win the ball game, but it didn’t happen,” Hornets coach Mitchell Coey said. “It’s tough. We made some mistakes, some first-game mistakes.

“We had a chance at the end and we had to choose, either go for the win or try to tie it. I figured let’s try and get it to overtime because they were sucking wind. We were tired too, but I wanted to take a chance and get into overtime.”

Huntsville’s Martin Juarez sent his 40-yard kick try sailing, but it hooked right and missed by about three feet. Had the Hornets not come up short on three two-point attempts earlier in the game, plus missed the only point-after try Juarez kicked, the game would not have come down to a long field goal try on fourth-and-8.

Coey defended his decision to fake the first extra-point try and go for two. That early miss, according to the coach, forced his hand the rest of the way.

“We worked on that play all week. There was only one person on the other side of (Huntsville quarterback Justin) Gilbert, and we had two people wide open,” Coey said of the busted swinging gate play the Hornets tried after Joseph Maxey scored early in the first quarter on a 6-yard run. “After that we were playing catch-up all night.”

With his feet and his arm, Gilbert showed Saturday that he was no one-year wonder. Gilbert ran for one score and passed for another. He finished the night with 221 yards passing and 56 more on the ground. His 33-yard strike to Howard Brown gave Huntsville its first lead, 18-14 with 8:10 left in the third quarter.

After Parsons capped a late third-quarter drive with a 1-yard TD run, the Hornets answered with a breakaway run by senior Kevin Butcher. A small scatback-type, Butcher broke a tackle at the line of scrimmage and found nothing but open running room, 49 yards to the end zone with 5:25 left in the game.

The Hornets celebrated Butcher’s touchdown for a second, then went back to work. But Parsons was simply too tough on this night. His 31-yard scamper to the right moved the ball into Huntsville territory. The Cavaliers’ starting quarterback then went left on the next play and was brought down from behind at the Hornets’ 5.

Solano slammed over from there, and the Cavaliers went ahead for good in a game that saw the lead change four times in the second half.

“Their offense is pretty much designed around (Parsons), and he’s very good,” Davidson said.

Coey added, “We didn’t stop him, and they didn’t stop our guy (Gilbert). We lost the game, though. There are no moral victories. We lost. We’ve got to go back to work Monday and try and beat St. Pius.”

The Hornets play their home opener Friday against Houston St. Pius, the two-time defending state champs of TAPPS Division I football. Game time at Bowers Stadium is 7:30 p.m.

        

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