Lancers steamroll Liberty in battle of unbeatens

AMHERST — Leave it to Amherst County High School’s football team to turn a showdown between undefeated Seminole District powers into a homecoming parade.

The Lancers (4-0, 2-0 Seminole) came out as a team on a mission in Friday night’s clash against Liberty and took care of business early, rolling to a 42-0 lead before the halftime pageantry, when quarterbacks Kirby Anderson and Anthony Rose were crowned homecoming kings of their respective junior and senior classes.

Liberty (4-1, 0-1) did show some life in the second half, scoring the final 20 points, mostly against Amherst’s second-team defense, before succumbing 49-20.

Just as the members of the Lancers’ deep and talented backfield are interchangeable, Anderson, filling in for Rose who sprained his left (throwing) shoulder in last week’s 41-0 rout of GW-Danville, showed himself to be a worthy heir to Rose’s throne. He completed six of nine passes for 210 yards and three touchdowns, the first a 72-yard screen play to Rose, left open on the right flat, for a 21-0 lead late in the first quarter.

“I was happy to have a good game and I did whatever I could do, but it was all on the line and the receivers ran great routes,” Anderson said. “(Rose) did a great job on that. I just passed for one yard and he did the rest of the work. The running game kind of set us up for all that, too.”

Senior tailback Jamal Glover picked up where he left off against GW, rushing for 132 yards and two touchdowns on just four carries (33.0 average), including a 67-yarder straight up the middle on Amherst’s first play from scrimmage.

The Lancers’ first three scoring drives were one-play strikes, with Glover reaching paydirt the second time he touched the ball as well, from 49 yards out.

“We have obviously some real good big-play potential and our kids came out of the locker room with the right frame of mind,” Amherst coach Cecil Phillips said. “Liberty’s an excellent football team. They’ve got athletes on both sides of the ball. Their defense has been playing very aggressively the first four ballgames and we knew we’d have to play well. Our kids rose to that challenge and really executed well and we hit some big plays early.”

Once they got the momentum going in their favor, it was nearly impossible for the Minutemen to slow the Lancers down.

“It’s hard to simulate that kind of speed in practice,” Liberty coach Chris Watts said of Amherst’s explosive skill players. “You think you’ve got a good plan, but when you come out and actually face it, it’s something you’ve got to adapt to and we didn’t adapt fast enough. We didn’t tackle well and we gave them too many lanes running.

“But that’s a great football team,” he added. “There’s not going to be many people that can match up with their speed.”

Being at Amherst, facing a wall of red-clad fans in the opposing stands, made the challenge all the more daunting for the Minutemen.

“Playing here at home, they’re a lot better football team, with this crowd and on their turf and when they get rolling,” Watts said. “We came out a little wide-eyed, didn’t tackle well early, got caught in the atmosphere a little bit and that first touchdown run kind of popped our bubble … and it took us a while to recover from that.”

Liberty did respond in the second half, preventing Amherst, which has been to the past three Group AA, Division 4, state championship games, from posting its second straight shutout. Vonte Harper sandwiched two touchdown passes — a 32-yarder from Anthony Reynolds in the third quarter and a 28-yarder from Kody Outhong in the fourth — around Brett Dietrich’s 50-yard fumble return to make the final score respectable.

But it was still demoralizing.

“It’s one of those things that our kids have got to learn from and we’ve got to be able to rise to the occasion and we just didn’t do it in the first half,” Watts said. “It’s a hard loss to take, but it’s one loss. We’re 4-1, we’re still in a good position in Division 3 to do what we want to do.”

Life doesn’t get much easier for Liberty next week when it hosts defending district champion and Division 3 rival Brookville.