After a last-second loss in Week 3 to crosstown rival St. Vincent, one might have expected the Perryville Pirates’ football team to be a little down when they returned home to host Bayless last Thursday.
Instead, fans were treated to a 37-8 victory over the visiting Bronchos (1-3), one which left
Pirates coach Brent Roth felt a little conflicted.
“I don’t know that we necessarily played a complete game still,” Roth said. “We still have too many penalties, too many unforced errors, and little things like that. But there’s definitely a lot of positive moments tonight and a lot of flashes on both sides of the ball. It obviously feels good to win — you enjoy — but we’ve still got to improve. I still don’t feel like we’re playing as good football as we’re capable of. It’s got to get better every week, and I still think this team has a really high ceiling. We’re just not there yet.”
Despite those errors, the Pirates (2-2) still managed to put up a few nice offensive numbers, led by senior running back Barrett Wheeler and sophomore receiver Xzyavier Wilson.
Wheeler rushed for 159 yards and 3 touchdowns on 17 carries, while Wilson added 2 touchdowns and 135 yards on 5 catches.
“We didn’t play as best as we could, but we played pretty good,” said Wheeler, one of the Pirates’ team captains. “We should have scored more than 37 points, and we should have given up zero points defensively. It’s just little things we’ve got to clean up. Defense is kind of the same thing. We’ve got to clear up penalties. Penalties are killing us still, so we’ve got to clean that up.”
The Pirates built a 28-8 lead by the half, including a 49-yard touchdown pass to Wilson from senior quarterback Kayd Luckey. Wilson made it look easy with a sideline juke that let him break past a Broncho defender for the score.
Luckey completed 13 of 20 passing attempts and finished the night with 234 yards passing and 2 touchdowns with 1 interception. He also rushed 3 times for 18 yards.
The rest of the Pirates’ offense accounted for an additional 152 yards, with most of it coming from the team’s other captain, senior Drew Leuckel, who finished with 4 catches for 48 yards and rushed 2 times for 21 yards.
“Last week, it was a hard loss for us,” Leuckel said. “This week, we really hit it extra hard. We stayed a little later, did the little things, and it made a difference.”
The Pirates' defense also had a decent night, holding Bayless to one touchdown — which came in the first quarter — while forcing a safety and two turnovers in the game.
Adrian Mendoza finished with 8 total tackles (5 assisted) and a forced fumble, while Josh Gremaud tallied 12 (8 assisted), and Sergio Mendoza had 5 solo tackles, including 2 for loss.
“[Bayless] has speed and they have an explosive offense,” Roth said. “That Marvin Jones kid is probably the best running back in our conference, and their quarterback has very good top-end speed. He’s a real tough runner. We knew they were capable. We knew that we just had to keep him in front of us. When they get behind us, we probably aren’t catching him, and that’s what happened. He got behind us on that big play, and we knew that was a possibility.”
As for the rest of the season, Roth hopes the Pirates continue to focus on the “little things” his captains mentioned with the expectation that the big things will take care of themselves.
“It’s definitely a philosophy,” Roth said. “We went back and we looked at our team rules. We looked at my coaching philosophy, we looked at our offensive scheme, our defensive scheme. We have some Pirate Principles that we always put in at the beginning of the year and we went through those in our film session on Monday and I pointed out and I highlighted everything that we weren’t doing. The things that this program is supposed to be built on, our core, we weren’t doing those things.
"We weren’t cleaning up after ourselves, right? We weren’t being respectful to all of our teammates. It was the little things. So I challenged the guys. I said, 'We’ve got to quit focusing on winning. Focus on the process. Do the little things. If you’re not willing to pick up trash, you’re not going to be willing to go lay your body on the line and block for your teammate. You can’t even pick up a piece of trash.’ “That’s exactly what we’ve been echoing. It’s awesome to hear our senior leaders echoing the same thing.”
Kickoff for this week’s game against Grandview in Hillsboro is set for 7 p.m. Roth said he hopes his team is paying attention.
“We need to take care of the little things,” Roth said. “It’s the same old thing, that and trying to figure out how I can get these guys to realize that penalties are killing us.”
