Sa vs. Copiah: Week 11

Vols’ Season Ends In Playoff Loss

GALLMAN – Late in the first quarter of Friday night’s MAIS Class 5A playoff opener, one Starkville Academy player turned to another along the sideline and said, rather facetiously, “I wonder who (Copiah) is going to give the ball to this time?”

He knew the answer. So, too, did nearly everybody else in the stadium. And, sure enough, right on cue, Copiah quarterback Jackson Teasley took the snap, turned and handed the ball off to big No. 0 Tre Ellis, who rambled 22 yards for a touchdown.

Knowing, and being able to do something about it, are two entirely different things. Ellis’ scoring run was a precursor of things to come as SA simply had no answer for Ellis – a 6-foot-3, 240-pound brute of a running back – or Copiah on this early November evening in central Mississippi. The Colonels scored on all five of their first half possessions en route to a commanding 36-7 victory over the Vols.

Copiah, the No. 5 seed, improved to 8-3 and advances to face No. 4 seed Oak Forest Academy. The Colonels entered 2-2 in the their final four regular season games as injuries have been an issue.

SA finished 4-7. The Vols lost their last two games after defeating rival Heritage Academy three weeks ago to re-enter the postseason discussion.

“I thought Copiah got healthy at the right time, and we still had a few key injuries,” SA coach Chase Nicholson said. “I thought the effort from our guys was there, they just had a couple of guys who made a big difference in the game. I’m always proud of my guys.”

Ellis was certainly one of those guys. The junior finished with 71 yards on nine carries and accounted for three touchdowns. He also bullied his way to a 3-yard touchdown run and added a 54-yard touchdown reception on a perfectly-executed screen play in the middle of the field. Speedy scatback Jamarius Grayer was lightning to Ellis’ thunder, scampering for 80 yards on two carries, including a 27-yard touchdown run late in the second quarter that set into motion a rolling clock.

Teasley, meanwhile, completed all seven of his pass attempts for 130 yards and one touchdown. He also added a 3-yard touchdown run. He engineered an offense that generated 310 total yards – 293 coming in the first half. On the flip side, SA managed 145 total yards of offense – 129 rushing, 16 passing – against a stingy Colonels’ defense that came in allowing only 15 points per game.

Quarterback Luke McKenzie’s 4-yard touchdown run with five minutes remaining accounted for the Vols’ lone score. Running back Luke Johnson had a team-high 80 yards on 12 carries, including a 39-yarder that helped set up McKenzie’s touchdown run. Johnson finished the season with 1,024 yards, marking the second straight season he eclipsed 1,000 yards rushing.

The season began with a road loss at Lamar and ended here with a road playoff loss to Copiah. In between, there were more lows than highs in what eventually evolved into an outlier in the Nicholson era at SA. Nicholson and his staff have done an outstanding job since he took over the program a decade ago. Over the course of his first nine seasons, the Vols have won one State championship (2017), finished runner-up another year (2019) and have averaged 8.5 wins per season over that span.

Some of those seasons, he and his staff did more with less while one can argue some staffs did less with more. The personnel losses from last year’s 9-3 team proved, in the end, too much to overcome.

Inevitably, losing seasons happen. In nearly every program. If Nicholson could have a mulligan he would take it against Bayou. The Vols turned the ball over a handful of times in that game, resulting in a narrow home loss that helped define the season on a lot of different levels.

“I thought the whole season was full of adversity that none of us had ever dealt with,” Nicholson said. “Each week the guys gave us a chance to win. We were one game away (Bayou) where if we eliminate one turnover and we’re able to win that game, then we run the clock out on Magnolia Heights and we are district champs. Life doesn’t always go that way, and somewhere in the next days, weeks, months, years we will all know what we needed to learn from this seaso