Tri-County cruises to second straight title

Tri-County Academy continued their dominance of MAIS 4A on Friday night, defeating Bowling Green 27-3 for the program’s second straight title and third championship in the last four years.

“Our kids, all the way from junior high up, want to do what it takes to win,” Tri-County Academy Head Coach Philip Wasson said. “Our players, our coaches, our school, our community, they all do everything they can for this program to be successful.”

This senior class for the Rebels will go down as the most dominant in Tri-County Academy football history up to this point, being the first senior class in program history to win three state title during their four years with the program, 

“We have had a great group of seniors that have done a great job of being leaders for our program,” Wasson said. “They have bought-in the whole time since we’ve had them in  seventh grade, they know what the expectations are and they have done a great job of leading in every way possible.”

It was an absolute slugfest through the first half of this game, with Bowling Green getting the scoring started by taking the ball down and kicking a field goal on their opening drive. 

From that point on, the Tri-County defense that has been a force all season, continued that streak of dominance by not allowing a point the rest of the game against a tricky Bowling Green triple option attack that gave the Rebels some trouble early on.

“We just told them that we had to be more physical on defense,” Wasson said. “We weren’t playing as physically as we normally do and in order to win this game we knew had to step it up and we did in the third and fourth quarter.”

Senior Quarterback Bryce Warriner has been the steady hand under center for the Rebels and has been a major reason for their success over the past few years. He opened the scoring for Tri-County in this one with a long touchdown pass to Peyton Patridge that got the Rebel offense trending in the right direction throughout the rest of the game.

“I got here in seventh grade and I immediately knew that football was life at Tri-County,” Warriner said. “It’s really special to have won three championships in four years, but there is no luck behind that, we worked really hard through the season and offseason every year.”

After taking a 7-3 lead into the halftime break, the dynamic duo at running back for the Rebels took over in the second half, with Rhett Gray scoring on the ground and Hayden Hunt adding two more rushing touchdowns to salt away the victory for Tri-County.

The balance in the offense for Tri-County has been a major weapon all season long and that once again showed in this championship game for the Rebels.

“Getting the run game established early is always great,” Warriner said. “When you can be a dual-threat team, the defense doesn’t know what your offense is going to do and it can open a lot of different things up.”

The title win caps off an undefeated 13-0 season for Tri-County, in which they were dominant throughout. The Rebels totaled nine running clocks and an average margin of victory of 31.3 points per win.

This has been a special team all season long and now they have the hardware to prove it.