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Published Saturday, October 31, 2009 in Sports

Hawks survive scare

By Chris Goltermann

The Times-Herald

The Heritage School football team got its biggest scare of the season one night early on Halloween Eve, digging itself out of a three-touchdown halftime deficit to pull out a 39-35 victory in the closing minutes at home against Harvester Christian.

Candler Rich capped off a 245-yard rushing effort on a four-yard touchdown run with just over 30 seconds to play and the hometown Hawks held defensively to hang on in a game that looked dead and buried at halftime.

Heritage jumped out to an early 7-0 lead and then went through six turnovers before halftime by six different Hawks players, allowing Harvester to jump ahead 35-14 at the break.

"That was about as miserable a first half as I've seen," said Heritage head coach Larry Harrison. "But that's as good an effort from a team that I've had. For us to come back from all that was tremendous."

Heritage entered Friday's game knowing it needed a win to stay alive for a potential three-way tiebreaker that never materialized. Arlington Christian took care of its end with a 55-8 blowout over winless Colonial Hills. But Griffin Christian's double-overtime upset of defending Region 4-AA champion Flint River gave the Crusaders this year's title and the No. 1 seed in next week's state playoffs.

Arlington Christian finishes third ahead of Heritage by way of its head-to-head victory over the Hawks earlier this year.

But despite finishing fourth in the division, Friday's effort certainly went a long way toward giving Heritage confidence heading into the playoffs against Region 2-AA champion Bulloch Academy. On Friday, Bulloch Academy (6-3, 3-0) beat Edmund Burke (7-1, 3-0) 18-15 to decide the region title.

"We're going to have to beat a No 1 (team) at some point, it might as well be now," said Harrison, whose team won its fourth game this season by five points or less. "I think those kind of things can help in this situation."

They certainly seemed to on Friday. Trailing for almost the entire game, Heritage dominated the line of scrimmage in the fourth quarter against a tired Harvester defense, which didn't get a whole lot of rest. The Douglasville school converted on five of the six Hawks turnovers, which came in every way possible. Heritage fumbled the ball from scrimmage, as well as on a punt and a pair of kickoff returns.

Rich, who was responsible for the first fumble of the game that led to Harvester's first score, turned himself into a hero by game's end after it looked as if Heritage had exhausted its final chance to pull ahead in the fourth quarter.

Down 35-29, a 15-play Heritage drive from their own 22-yard line with just over eight minutes remaining stalled with 1:31 left at the four-yard line, before a fourth-down pass into the end zone by Joe Bonner to Evan Graybill was ruled out-of-bounds with one of the tight end's feet touching the end line.

But on Harvester's ensuing first-down snap, the exchange was fumbled into the end zone and smothered by the defense for a safety and the ball on an ensuing free kick.

Taking over at its own 36-yard line with all three timeouts remaining, Rich took Heritage's next offensive snap and rumbled 54 yards off right tackle down to the Harvester nine.

Three plays later from the Harvester 4-yard line, the Hawks freshman barreled in with a go-ahead score. Stuart Bready's two-point conversion pushed a five-point lead and forced the visitors from Douglasville to go 54 yards the other way before running out of time.

Rich had 165 yards on 22 carries alone in the second half as Heritage finished with a whopping 448 yards of total offense.

Bready finished with 115 yards rushing and two touchdowns, both in the first half. Kyle Kimsey rushed for 39 yards and a touchdown.

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