Hawks drop a heartbreaker to Berkeley, 26-25
There sometimes is a fine line between winning and losing. Unfortunately for the Hanahan Hawks, Friday night was a case of being on the wrong side of that line.
The Hawks traveled to Berkeley for a county showdown. In a case of “woulda, coulda shoulda” Charlie Patterson’s team came up short, dropping a 26-25 decision.
“We just have to get better,” Patterson said after his team dropped its third game of the season after winning the season-opener. “We don’t have to get 1,000 times better. We just have to get a little better and eliminate the mistakes. I’m proud of our effort. We just have to play better.”
Patterson felt his team played good enough to win.
“I felt we shot ourselves in the foot way too many times,” Patterson said. “I don’t think Berkeley stopped us. I think we stopped ourselves with missed assignments, mistakes and turnovers. We had our first fumble of the year, and you can’t expect to make mistakes in a game like this and expect to win.”
Berkeley, 2-2, took the lead for good at 26-25 when quarterback Darius Douglas scored on a 3-yard run to cap a 70-yard drive with just under two minutes left in the game. It was Douglas’ third TD of the game.
Douglas’ first TD came late in the first half soon after Hanahan coughed the ball up on a fumble.
After Douglas completed his touchdown hat trick, Hanahan’s Jamie Watson returned the kickoff to the Berkeley 32-yardline, but the drive ended with four straight incompletions. The Hawks had a chance to keep the drive alive, but a dropped passed on fourth down sealed the Hawks’ fate.
Hanahan took a 19-14 lead with less than 11 minutes left in the game when quarterback Victor Colbert scored on a 3-yard TD run.
Douglas countered with a 34-yard TD run to give the Stags a 20-19 lead. But Quincy Mitchell gave the Hawks’ life when he intercepted a pass and returned it to the enemy 7. Jerry Bailey ran 5 yards for a TD to give his team a 25-20 lead. It was Bailey’s second TD of the night. But the Hawks failed to convert a two-point PAT when they were flagged for offensive pass interference.
The three-game losing streak is the Hawks’ longest since 2011 when they opened the season with four consecutive losses. They finished with a 7-5 record that year.
Hanahan plays at St. John’s on Friday. The Hawks follow that up with a home game against Cane Bay on Sept. 23. The Cobras are proving to be one of the top teams in the Lowcountry for 2016.
“We’ve played a couple of teams above us (in classification),” Patterson said. We played a (Class) 5-A team and we played a (Class) 4-A team. If we could have played just a little better and eliminated some of the mistakes, we might not be 1-3 at this stage of the game.”