With a difficult Olney team paying them a visit on Friday, the Cisco Loboes could ill afford a misstep in their quest to win District 4-2A Division I — not with Stamford and Hawley still on their plate.
Cisco turned to veteran quarterback Hunter Long to get the job done and our Big Country Preps Player of the Week responded with an eye-popping 338 yards rushing and five touchdowns on 20 carries to help Cisco (6-1, 3-0) to a 34-15 win.
Early 36, Ballinger 0 — The Longhorns rushed for 200 yards and four scores and Jaxyn Price threw for 161 yards and another TD in a win at Ballinger.
Griffin Cheslock rushed for 130 yards and one touchdown and Caleb Ozuna rushed for 50 yards and two more scores as Early improved to 3-3 and 1-0.
Limited to just minus-35 yards in total offense, Ballinger dropped to 0-6 and 0-1.
After an 0-1 start in district play with a loss at Wall, the Clyde Lady Bulldogs were facing some pressure last week in tough league matchups against Jim Ned and San Angelo TLCA.
Clyde responded with a pair of wins and our Big Country Preps Player of the Week, junior setter Abby Carr was at the forefront of that effort.
Charting 38 assists, 19 kills and four aces, Carr was not only setting up the offense, but when rotating to the front line, she also did a pretty fair job of finishing it.
Wall 14, Mason 6 — The Hawks (4-1) were the lone District 2-3A DII team to see action on Friday.
For a full report on this game, please read Brandon McAuliffe’s game story.
Whether you’re a coach, fan, Old School patron of the game or analytics nerd, you have to be impressed with what Hayden Baronet is doing on the field and to the record books at Brady this fall.
In his third year as the Bulldogs’ starting quarterback — and only halfway through the regular season — Baronet has already amassed 1,436 yards in total offense and accounted for 18 touchdowns. Last week, in the Bulldogs’ 47-27 win over Christoval, he completed 18 of 29 passes for 231 yards and two TDs and rushed for 179 yards and an astonishing five touchdowns.
And that’s just taking into consideration what he is doing on offense. In the game against the Cougars, the senior also had 10 tackles, an interception, a pass breakup and a tackle for loss from his free safety position on defense.
Add all of that up, and you get … well, if your name is Hayden Baronet, you get the state’s “Built Ford Tough” Player of the Week honor in Class 3A, a weekly award bestowed on the top performer from each classification.
Some people in the Big Country may not even know where tiny Three Way High School is.
For the record it’s on the outskirts of Stephenville, it plays in District 11-1A DI (six-man) and if our Big Country Preps Player of the Week has any say about it, you’ll be hearing a lot more about the Braves in the near future.
Colt Berry, a senior spreadback, had an eye-popping performance last week in a 73-54 win over Aquilla, amassing 561 all-purpose yards to help the Braves (1-3) to their first win of the year.
LAST WEEK: 51-10, .836
SEASON TOTAL: 131-42, .757
Football picks are something I take pride in and it irritates me to no end when I stink it up. So let’s just say, I burned some midnight oil to get that situation corrected last week.
As a result, the column recovered with a solid .836 percentage in Week 3, salvaging my bruised ego after a disastrous Week 2 tally. In all, 51 of 61 area picks hit the mark last week, elevating my season’s record above 75 percent.
That’s more like it.
Week 4 in the meantime, presents a lineup of some of the most difficult area picks we’ve had this season — including an explosive Glen Rose team facing Brownwood in our BCP Game of the Week. Let’s dive in, shall we?
Here’s this week’s forecast:
In a week that featured several performances worthy of capturing the Capital Farm Credit/BCP Player of the Week award, Clyde quarterback Blake Carr narrowly captured the top spot with an explosive performance in a 41-21 win over Merkel.
Carr, a junior, hit 18 of 23 passes for 311 yards and four scores as CHS improved to 2-1 on the year. He also rushed six times for 106 yards and a fifth touchdown on a 46-yard run.
After a week of highlighting area playmakers, we wrap up our eight-part preseason position rankings series with the Big Country’s best signal callers.
To complete our look at the area’s top players, we’ve ranked our top 10 quarterbacks with a list of others to watch in 2022.
We hope you enjoy this list and that you’ve enjoyed our position rankings as we get set to kick off a new season.
As we wind down our eight-part preseason position rankings series, we arrive finally at the Big Country’s top ball-carriers.
After breaking down this year’s crop of receivers and tight ends earlier today, we move now to the area’s top backs, ranking our top 10 with a list of others to watch in 2022. Don’t forget to check in Thursday when we conclude our series with the top 10 area quarterbacks.
We hope you enjoy tonight’s list and encourage you to check out the other position groups, which are linked below.
We’re approaching the final stretch of our eight-part preseason position rankings series, and it’s time to look at the Big Country’s top receivers.
After starting the offensive portion of our series Tuesday with the linemen, we now shift our attention to the playmakers on the perimeter, ranking our top 10 wideouts/tight ends with a list of others to watch in 2022.
We hope you enjoy our list and encourage you to check out the other position groups, which are linked below.
With the defensive and special teams rankings behind us, it’s time to look at the area’s top offensive players. And we’ll start with the foundation of any productive offense: the offensive line.
For the fifth installment of our eight-part preseason position rankings series, we turn our attention to the trenches, ranking the Big Country’s top 10 offensive linemen with a list of others to watch in 2022.
We hope you enjoy reading through our rankings.
After recognizing the top defensive players throughout the Big Country over the past three days, it’s time to honor the specialists.
We continue our eight-part preseason position rankings series by naming our top eight kickers and top eight punters to watch this fall.
We hope you enjoy this list and that you have enjoyed our position rankings as we get set to kickoff the 2022 season.
After starting with the linemen and linebackers, we turn to the defensive backfield to complete our look at the top defenders in the Big Country.
For the third installment in our eight-part preseason position rankings series, we shift our focus to the secondary, giving our list of the area’s top-10 defensive backs and others to look out for in 2022.
We hope you enjoy our list.
After taking a look at the Big Country’s top defensive linemen on Saturday, it’s now time to examine those who will backing them in 2022.
Continuing with Big Country Preps’ eight-part preseason position rankings series, here’s our top 10 linebackers to watch this fall, as well as a list of the others we’re expecting big things from.
We hope you enjoy our list.
With the start of football season around the corner, it’s time to take a look at the players who will be making the biggest impact in 2022.
For the first installment in an eight-part series that will cover all position groups, we’ll be taking a look at the area’s top defensive linemen, ranking our top 10 with a list of others to watch this fall.
As with any such list, these rankings are subjective. We hope you enjoy reading through them.
Without further ado, it is time for us to make our Big Country predictions, district-by-district.
This is the culmination of several weeks of research and two solid months of summertime labor, so we’re more than ready to post it.
In 2021, no running back tandem in the Big Country Preps coverage area was more productive than Brady’s JD Ibarra and Zeke Jones.
Providing the Bulldogs with a big, strong power back and a dynamic, game-breaking speed back, respectively, those two both topped the 1,000-yard mark in helping BHS to its best season since 2009.
With both backs back for another run this fall — Ibarra as a senior and Jones as a junior — Brady is hoping to build on the success it enjoyed last season. And coach Shay Easterwood is confident his dynamic running back duo will continue to lead the charge for his offense.
In 2021, the Brady football team broke through with its first winning season of the Shay Easterwood era.
Coming off that 8-4 campaign, which featured a run to the third round of the Class 3A Division II playoffs, the Bulldogs are out now to prove they have some staying power.
Sharing District 2-3A DII with former 3A DI playoff teams Wall and Early, Brady will have its hands full trying to match the district co-championship it earned last fall. But the Bulldogs are excited to tackle that challenge and eager to show that last year’s success wasn’t an isolated occurrence.
Day 6 of Big Country Preps’ 2022 Photo Tour is now in the books, with one more day of shooting yet to come from practice fields throughout the area.
Here are but a few of the images collected Friday and Saturday:
Football is just around the corner, and we at BigCountryPreps.com are committed to bringing you the information you need to prepare for your favorite team’s season.
We’ll be releasing our Big Country Preps Preseason Football Preview, the most comprehensive look at the upcoming Big Country football season anywhere, on Wednesday, Aug. 17. But you won’t have to wait until then to sate your gridiron appetite.
Leading up to the first day of fall football practice on Aug. 1, we’ll be spotlighting each 11-man team in the area and posing some of the key questions they’ll face in 2022 as part of our annual “Countdown to Two-a-Days” series.
We stay in Class 3A Division II with the Brady Bulldogs. On Friday we will take a look at the Early Longhorns followed by the Wall Hawks on Saturday.
Merkel’s Alyssa O’Malley is no stranger to our Capital Farm Credit/BCP Player of the Week column.
If she’s not in the weekly mix during the basketball season as one of the area’s top players, she’s competing for our top spot during the spring in track and field.
Her latest exploit: How about four area championships in solo events, despite having a painful foot injury?
For Stephenville standout Coy Eakin to land our Capital Farm Credit/BCP Player of the Week really shouldn’t surprise anyone.
Already signed to play football at Texas Tech, Eakin earned Offensive MVP honors in the wake of a spectacular performance in the Class 4A state title win over Austin LBJ in December, which netted him our final award for 2021. So this isn’t his first rodeo.
Eakin’s latest big-time performance came at the District 6-4A track meet, where he captured two individual district championships in the triple jump (43-0) and long jump (20-10) and assisted in a third title with the 1,600 relay team (50.5 anchor leg).
It’s important to note that Eakin took the district titles in the triple jump and long jump on short notice — having only practiced for both events for a week. That, ladies and gentlemen, is absolutely remarkable at the Class 4A level.
Even in high school baseball, perfect games are rare. Two perfect games in one week in the same league are extremely uncommon.
Two perfect games in one week, thrown by a pair of teammates are about as elusive as a Lochness Monster sighting.
And coincidentally, that’s about how often Big Country Preps names two players for the Capital Farm Credit/BCP Player of the Week.
It’s difficult to top back-to-back shutouts when searching for a Player of the Week, especially when one of the vanquished is a solid team from a higher classification.
That was the case last week for Colorado City softball pitcher Kaci Rivera, who held both Big Spring (7-0) and Borden County (6-0) to a goose egg, with 23 strikeouts in 14 innings of work.
Our Capital Farm Credit/BCP Player of the Week allowed only five total hits in the two games, to go with two walks.
“Kaci has really started to show her dominance on the mound,” coach Krysten Marr said. “She is a fierce competitor on both sides of the ball and we are excited to see how she does going into district play.”
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Continue reading “PHOTO GALLERY: Brady-Merkel baseball (46 images)”
Digital photos, prints and keepsakes may be purchased by clicking on the “Buy on SmugMug” link below. The “BigCountryPreps.com” watermark will be removed from all purchased photos.
Continue reading “PHOTO GALLERY: Brady-Jim Ned baseball (32 images)”
TUSCOLA — The Jim Ned baseball team has won countless games the past few seasons on the strength of stellar pitching and dependable defense.
That trend continued on Tuesday night in the Indians’ District 6-3A opener as Jim Ned knocked off Brady 2-0 at Indian Field behind a dominant performance on the mound by Blaine Palmer.
The senior allowed just two hits, one in the sixth inning and another in the seventh, and had 16 strikeouts while giving up just a single walk. He needed just 93 pitches to throw the complete-game shutout.
Here are the updated Big Country boys basketball playoff pairings, results through March 5:
Continue reading “Big Country boys basketball playoff pairings, results (March 5)”
Below are the final regular season statistical leaders for Big Country boys basketball in 2022.
This database has been continually updated for our subscribers throughout the season, using only those statistics submitted by area coaches.