Tharptown snaps 22-game losing streak with 40-12 victory over Vina

“They got the monkey off their back now.”

That was first-year Tharptown head coach Brian White’s message to his team, as told by him on the Football in the South Scoreboard Show, after the Wildcats snapped their 22-game losing streak on Friday night. Tharptown (1-4), with a run-heavy attack, defeated Vina (0-5) 40-12 to secure its first win since September 1, 2023.

“That was the first win in two years. They’ve got the monkey off their back now, so we can settle down and focus on the process,” White said on the radio show.

The process for Tharptown against Vina Friday night was pretty simple: Get the ball into the hands of Cody McClusky.

“We had a good game plan,” White told the Franklin Free Press. “We felt like we had a couple of things we could do to them to score pretty quick, and we did.”

Vina drew first blood, getting a touchdown on their opening possession to make it 6-0. But the Wildcats responded quickly, tying the ball game up on a touchdown run by McClusky on their second play from scrimmage before converting on the two-point try to take an 8-6 lead.

From that point on, Tharptown had firm control of the game. The Wildcats, led by the quarterback McClusky, took a 24-6 advantage into the halftime intermission. After the break, THS extended its lead to 40-12 early in the fourth quarter. McClusky accounted for four of the Wildcats’ five touchdowns, rushing for three and connecting with Christian Willoughby for one passing touchdown. Austin Chaney, who finished the game with 10 carries for 52 yards, accounted for the other THS touchdown.

The Wildcats pounded the Red Devils on the ground all night, amassing 284 total rushing yards between McClusky, Chaney, and Anthony Bonilla—who finished with nine carries for 56 yards—among others.

“We know what we’re gonna lay our hat on and that’s running the football,” White said. “We did a good job of that Friday night. We knew we had some plays where we could get quality yards and we did. We had just a couple of short pass plays to keep the linebackers honest, and we were able to complete those. That kept them honest, kept the linebackers in conflict, and kept them from overflowing on some of the main stuff we were doing.”

On the other side of the ball, White pointed to some mistakes that the defense made, but all-in-all he was satisfied with the effort and performance he saw from that unit.

“The defense played pretty good. I think we gave up less than 100 yards rushing,” he said. “They did throw some deep passes on us and got behind our secondary with their eyes in the wrong place at couple times, but overall our defense played well.

“We ran to the football, we gang tackled pretty well at times. That’s something we’ve been driving to the kids—running to the football and gang tackling—and I think we did a pretty good job on those things,” White added.

Five games into the season, Tharptown has undergone some changes since the opening weekend, especially on offense. The Wildcats started out the campaign running the triple option with a young quarterback under center. This was part of White’s plan to get back to the basics, back to the fundamentals.

“We just wanted to get their feet wet,” he said.

After three weeks, White and his staff decided, with the aid of some extenuating circumstances, to shake things up. During Tharptown’s bye week, the Wildcats prepared the offense to run more plays out of gun formations and put McClusky back behind center.

“We told (the players) during the offseason that about halfway through the season we’d run more gun stuff, but they needed to learn the system and the fundamentals of how to run the system first,” White said. “Our young quarterback went down with an injury in a junior varsity game….so that helped us make the decision to go ahead and move to some of our gun stuff and put McClusky back there in that role as a dual-threat quarterback that a lot of people are utilizing nowadays.”

As a result of that change, Tharptown’s offense has become more formidable. The Wildcats have scored a combined 66 points in the last two weeks, compared to just eight points through the opening three contests.

“It’s really helped open our offense up,” White said. “I wasn’t sure how long it would take (McClusky) to pick up the things that we were teaching him, but he really did a great job of picking it up quick. There were some frustrations early, but it just so happened that we made the change during the off week, so the timing worked out and we had an extra week to prepare before the Decatur Heritage game.

“We’re still going through some growing pains, but the growing pains don’t hurt as bad as they did a few weeks ago,” White added.

Looking at Tharptown on paper, the Vina win is the most obvious sign of improvement. But White said you have to go back to the Decatur Heritage game for the first real signal of noticeable improvement—and emotional investment—with this group of Wildcats.

“I think (the players) knew this was working when we scored 26 points on Decatur Heritage. I’m not taking anything away from (DHCS) but that game could’ve been greatly different,” White added, explaining that half a dozen turnovers was what doomed THS in that contest.

“But even in the loss, that game gave us some ammunition for positivity. And for the first time we had kids literally crying after the ball game because we got beat,” he added. “In the past it was like, ‘Well, we lost another one.’ But seeing those kids crying on the field after the loss to Decatur Heritage, that told us that we were ready to turn a corner.

“Now, how much of a corner we’re ready to turn, I don’t know yet. But I think we’ll find out a lot (Monday at practice) because the last couple of years it’s been lose, lose, lose, lose—well, it’s just another loss. Now we’ve won a game—and won convincingly. Now lets see how we react to a win. Are we going to be satisfied with one win or are we going to come in and keep doing the things it takes to win and improve and see if we can’t get us another win or two?”

That question could be answered after Tharptown’s next contest, a home region contest against Tanner on Friday, October 3.