Danville riding hot streak into semistate game
By Mark Ambrogi
At halftime of its opening sectional game with Tri-West, the Danville High School football team was in a scoreless tie.
Warriors win Nov. 15 (Photo by Whitney Doyle Driver)
“Our guys turned it on in the second half and since then we’ve been playing our best football,” said Warriors coach K.C. Woods, whose team avenged an earlier loss to Tri-West with a 28-12 victory.
That started a four-game winning streak for the Warriors (8-5) will play host to Class 3A No. 2 Heritage Hills (13-0) at 8 p.m. Friday (Nov. 22) in the semistate.
“They’ve got size and speed,” Woods said of Heritage Hills. “It’s not hard to see why they are undefeated. We have our work cut out for us.”
The winner advances to the Class 3A state championship game at 3:30 p.m. Nov. 29 at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis. Danville advanced by beating host Vincennes Lincoln 35-14 in the regional Nov. 15.
“We had our most balanced game as far as yardage and number of attempts,” Woods said. “Obviously, we’ve rode our senior running back, Chandler Schubert, most of the way. He had gone for more than 200 yards in every playoff game up until Friday night. They had a pretty good plan for him and he still racked up some yards.”
Schubert, who has rushed for 1,896 yards for the season, still managed to rush for 152 yards on 29 carries, including touchdown runs of 4 and 8 yards.
Woods said sophomore quarterback Kale Payne helped by completing 18 of 23 passes for 185 yards and three touchdowns.
“He played extremely well,” Woods said. “He’s starting to come into his own and he’s going to be a really special player. He is putting that on display as the year has gone on.”
Vincennes Lincoln scored on its first two possessions and led 14-13 at halftime.
“(The Alices) came out and did some stuff we hadn’t seen (on film),” Woods said. “We made some adjustments. After they scored on their first two drives, we shut them down the rest of game. So, hats off to the defense, pitching three quarters worth of a shutout. The offense started picking up in the second quarter. The defense got some takeaways once we got them down and they were having to try to throw it. It was a recipe for us, take the early shots and figure things out. Once we do if we can put some scores and getting them doing things they don’t like to do, our DBs are pretty good about taking the ball away.”
This is 2008 Danville High School graduate Woods’ fourth season as coach with 37-14 record. The Warriors were 13-1 in 2017, losing to Evansville Memorial in the semistate.
“It’s awesome to be hosting our second semistate in four years,” Woods said.
