Caldwell’s Will Barnes directed a scoring drive and Eric Faughn caught a two-point conversion pass, but the WKC All-Stars couldn’t overcome an early deficit.
The high school football all-stars from Southern Illinois won for the fourth time in five meetings against their West Kentucky counterparts with a 21-18 victory Friday night at McAndrew Stadium on the SIU campus in Carbondale.
Four former Tigers played in the contest. In addition to Barnes and Faughn, Caldwell’s Kyle Proffitt, an offensive lineman, and Bubba Cain, a defensive lineman, also suited up for the WKC squad.
“All four of our kids played really well, but they probably didn’t play as much as they wanted to,” said Caldwell head coach David Barnes, who was an assistant on the West Kentucky staff.
“We shut (Southern Illinois) out the second half,” he noted. “But we were down 21-11 at halftime.
“Will took us down the field and we scored to make it 21-18. Then we had another drive that ended up with us not converting on fourth down.”
Barnes completed 13 of 16 passes for 89 yards and rushed five times for 17 yards in his time at quarterback.
The WKC team scored late in the first half after converting a 4th-and-48 when Casey Brockman of Calloway County connected with David Wallace of Christian County for a 48-yard pass play.
Brockman then scored on a 2-yard run as time expired. Christian’s James Bauer passed to Faughn for the conversion to make it 21-11.
“I think we just kind of got rolling,” WKC head coach Steve Lovelace of Christian County told the Mayfield Messenger of his team’s late march. “We started off with some screens and did some different things. It’s kind of hard to get everybody involved in an all-star game, but once we got rolling, we did pretty good.”
After a third-period storm warning delay of 34 minutes, Barnes executed the spread offense for a 73-yard, 13-play scoring drive. Bauer capped the drive with a 1-yard TD run to help trim the gap to 21-18.
That came with 4:30 left in the third quarter, but neither team scored the rest of the way.
“It was a good game,” Lovelace added. “I thought the kids played good, we gave up some stuff early and fought back well.
“We were trying to adjust to what they were doing. We’ve been playing (against) the spread all week and they ran some options on us ... We took the best kids from from each team and we tried, and all the coaches in our area did a great job.”
The series is scheduled to return to Roy Stewart Stadium in Murray next summer.
Last year, Southern Illinois won 21-7 in Murray. Three Tigers played in that game — Jake Pepper, Matt Tittle and Michael Lipson.
• Photos from the high school football all-star contest on Friday may be purchased at http://kmwsportsphotos.dotphoto.com.
