Mission accomplished: P.S. Jones football finishes unbeaten, wins league title

Published 1:12 am Thursday, October 31, 2024

By Jason O. Boyd

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As the final seconds ticked off the scoreboard, the P.S. Jones Middle School football team began a celebration that included two trophies and even a pro-wrestling-style belt.

Mission accomplished.

The Demons wrapped up a perfect season on Wednesday with a 42-20 win over A.G. Cox at J.G. “Choppy” Wagner Stadium. The team celebrated winning the regular season and tournament titles in the Pitt County Middle Schools Athletic Conference, a league comprised of teams from Pitt, Beaufort and Greene counties.

“So last year we struggled, we had a pile of seventh graders,” Demons coach John Scott Cutler said. “We had 22 eighth graders on this team the first day of practice. So, we knew the talent was there and the experience was there. It was, ‘Can we put it together?’ And I told people, I’m like, ‘Look, we’re going to be pretty good.’

“I didn’t know if it’s going to translate into wins and losses, but we’re going to be pretty good.”

The perfect season included an 8-0 win over the same A.G. Cox team in the second game of the season. That was a game played during bad weather and was the first with Julian Pender at quarterback after the Demons’ opening-day starting QB was lost for the season to an injury in the season opener.

“I was pretty nervous, at first he had switched me to quarterback,” Pender said about the move. “I had to get the hang of it, and once I started to get the hang of it, I started to get better and better and better.”

That talent by players like Pender, Jahcere Collins, Adrian Dudley and others was on display quickly in Wednesday’s game. On the first play of the game, Pender rolled right and bobbled the ball but regained it quickly. He continued to run, turned the corner and raced into the end zone for a 49-yard touchdown. Collins’ conversion run gave the Demons an 8-0 lead.

“I was very nervous,” Collins said. “I feel like that O-line is the reason why I scored touchdowns in this game.”

A.G. Cox got as close as 8-6 after scoring on a 1-yard run with 1:27 left in the opening quarter. The Demons’ defense denied the two-point conversion as Dudley and Taylon Moore made the tackle.

After that, it was all Demons football with an offensive line that helped make the offense run smooth.

Pender scored on a 1-yard run and the Demons made the conversion with 5:25 left in the first half to extend the lead to 16-6. After stopping A.G. Cox on downs, P.S. Jones’ offense moved down the field again, which led to a 27-yard field goal by Lawson O’Kane for a 19-6 halftime lead.

The Demons pulled away in the second half but not before the Raiders got to within 19-12 on a 51-yard touchdown pass that slipped out of the hands of a P.S. Jones defender on the first play of the second half. Collins converted a five-plus-minute drive by the Demons with a 6-yard scoring run with 34 seconds left in the third to push the lead back to 27-12.

Jaiden Boyd added a 53-yard interception for a touchdown with 7:44 left and Jacere Parker scored on a 5-yard run a minute later after the Demons recovered a fumble, extending the lead to 42-12.

“We played really good, and we just had to rely on each other,” Dudley said. “We had to be communicating the whole time, and just thank our coaches for pointing us where to be and how we played.”

The running clock was put into place to count down the final moments. The Raiders scored the final points on a 97-yard run after the Demons pinned them to their own 3 after a fumble on the kickoff.

“At the beginning of the season, it was good,” Pender said. “It was just we were slacking. We needed to work better together, and once we got the hang of that, we started taking over.”

The celebration included the players dousing Cutler with the watercooler after the game ended. It signified a joyous moment that began in late July with tryouts, practices and building a level of trust between the coaches and players that culminated with the victory.

“This year we got a couple wins under our belt, and you could feel the ball just start rolling,” Cutler said. “They started to trust the process, trust the system. We got a pretty structured practice. We do the same thing every day, and it shows.

“If you can run five or six plays really, really good in middle school, that’s all you’ve got to do. You don’t have to get all crazy.

“… I’m just going to enjoy the moment.”

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