Clint Thompson
THOMASVILLE — Thomas County Central had two weeks to prepare for Upson-Lee.
It now has one week to prepare for one of the longest road trips of the season.
Like last year, the Yellow Jackets’ first Region 1-AAAA victory came at the expense of the Knights. It was an important one for Central and coach Bill Shaver.
“I felt like this would be one of the teams in the mix for one of the four playoff spots,” Shaver said. “If you lose to them you’re always behind them in the tiebreaker-type deal. They’re going to get better, better and better. We wanted to make sure we stayed in front of them.”
The Yellow Jackets can now prepare for another winless team in the region. Central will travel to Gray next Friday night to play Jones County. Gray is located north of Macon.
“We’ve got that long road trip to Jones County that might take a day and a half to get there. We’ll have to do a good job,” Shaver said.
“We did a good job last year on all our road trips. We did well except for the Westside game. We went to Hardaway, we went to Upson. We came up ready to play.
“We’ve got to get ready to play. I think they run a little different defense than we’ve seen this year so it’ll be something different for our offense.”
Central’s offense had its most effective output of the season against the Knights. Central ran for 202 yards, led by quarterback Eric Dodson’s 86 on the ground.
“Eric executed extremely well tonight,” Shaver said. “There were some good blocks up there. I thought Nick Johnson did a great job of making some really good blocks to spring Eric on a couple of his long runs.”
Following Central’s trip to Gray, the Yellow Jackets will travel to Americus-Sumter the following week.
