Sanderson football
FILE PHOTO
Senior Sam Bauckham and the Sanderson football team scored 24 second-half points leading to a 38-24 victory over Enloe Friday night. It was Sanderson's first conference win of the season.
Spartans surge in second half, clipping Enloe 38-24
The Sanderson football team showed up to the costume party fashionably late Friday night, arriving shortly after halftime.
Once there, the Spartans shed their 1-8 image. They looked nothing like the team that committed eight turnovers a week ago against Wake Forest-Rolesville. You couldn’t tell them from the team which trailed 17-14 at halftime and had been outgained on the ground 228-34.
But Sanderson fooled everyone — even first-year head coach Tony Lewis — by outscoring Enloe 24-7 in the second half to earn a 38-24 road victory.
“We didn’t look like a team that’s 1-8,” Lewis said. “It says a lot about our kids to only have one win and come out with that kind of effort. You don’t always see that from a 1-8 team.”
Sanderson held the Eagles to just 30 rushing yards after halftime and found the end zone in three different ways to give Lewis his first conference win.
The Spartans flipped the game around in the third quarter with two trips to the end zone in a span of just 14 seconds.
After quarterback Sam Bauckham struck Chris Lampkins with a 35-yard touchdown on a play-action pass to take a 21-17 lead, Enloe’s Charlie Twitty coughed up a fumble on the first play of the Eagles’ ensuing possession and Sanderson’s Bryan Burke scooped it up and skipped in from 17 yards out.
The score pushed the Spartans' lead to 11 points, 28-17.
Sanderson’s first touchdown of the game, a one-yard burst by Derrick Powell, was set up when Enloe fumbled a punt return and J.R. Soto recovered on the Eagles’ 14-yard line.
“The difference was not just getting the turnovers but actually capitalizing on them,” Lewis said.
Enloe cut the Spartan lead to 28-24 early in the fourth when quarterback Phillip Jordan rolled out to his left and lobbed a ball over the top of the Sanderson secondary to an awaiting David Highsmith, who did the rest on a 65-yard scoring play.
But Paul Houston hammered a 40-yard field goal to push Sanderson’s lead to 31-24 and then the Spartan defense stuffed Qwen Yarborough on a fourth-and-one and the offense converted the turnover with a one-yard inside handoff to Matt James.
James entered the game averaging 78 receiving yards per game but was held to just two catches for nine yards against Enloe’s cover-three defense.
“We saw what they were doing with Matt and their cover-three and I thought we took advantage of it,” Lewis said. “We tried to spread the ball around and we had some other kids make some big catches.”
“We game-planned for their cover-three,” said Bauckham, who completed 12 of his 24 throws for 149 yards and two touchdowns. “It wasn’t based around any one person. We had a lot of different people step up.”
Josh O’Neal, Kevin Ott and Lampkins came into Friday averaging 49 receiving yards between them but combined for nine catches for 140 yards and a pair of touchdowns.
O’Neal scored the Spartans’ second touchdown of the game on an eight-yard pass from Bauckham in the second quarter.
Enloe got on the scoreboard with an 80-yard run by Highsmith on the Eagles’ first play from scrimmage and a five-yard run by Highsmith followed by a 37-yard field goal by Vinny Tsiba with two seconds left in the first half.
The Spartans finish out the season Friday, Nov. 6, hosting Broughton at 7 p.m.
“We’re playing for ourselves and for our pride,” Bauckham said. “Everything we do, we’re playing our hearts out.”
