BRENTWOOD – The game was on the line and every player in the Ravenwood High School football huddle knew it.
With just 6 1/2 minutes left in the tied contest, the Raptors had just taken possession of the football at the Whitehaven 23-yard line. With junior quarterback Chris Parson rolling left, chased by the withering pressure the Tigers had put on him all night outside of the pocket, he could hear his head coach, Will Hester, screaming instructions.
"Get out of bounds! Get out of bounds!"
"I'm not going to lie to you. I was yelling to him to get out of bounds," Hester said after the contest. "But he makes plays I don't expect, and he sure did there."
Parson was more matter of fact about the pass.
"Normally, I don't hear anything during a play, but I was so close to the sidelines I heard him scream, but sometimes you just have to trust your teammates," he said. "We needed a play. I was planning on throwing the ball out of bounds and at the last minute I saw him in the back of the end zone, and I trust him 100%. He did a thing, made a toe tap catch … it was just a great play by Lee."
Molette had a huge night, grabbing six passes for 109 yards, while Parson threw for 155 yards and rushed for 40 more.
As in the prior three meetings between Ravenwood and Whitehaven, all in state semifinal matchups, no lead was safe. The pair proved that again at the start of the game when a short-field drive that ended with Parson rushing in from three yards out in the first quarter was immediately answered with a 92-yard kick-off return for a score by JaQuez Bradley.
The Raptor defense slammed the door on those kinds of Whitehaven thoughts. Michigan commitment Myles Pollard came up with a pair of crucial open field tackles to help seal the deal. Whitehaven's last chance ended when quarterback William Carver was forced to the middle and was immediately stood up by Jaden Moore.
"Coach (Andy) Elrod teaches us to stay at home and it will come back to us. And he did," a smiling Moore said. "It was a crazy experience. We just kept on fighting."
Hester gushed about his offense, which held the explosive Tigers to barely 250 yards of total offense.
"The defense just played lights out," he said. "We may have given up some points early in the year, but we're hitting our stride right now and I can't be any prouder. They scored one offensive touchdown."
The game was fraught with mental errors. Both teams suffered critical special teams problems and the two squads combined for 17 penalties, accounting for 150 yards.
"We can talk about the bad, but we live to play another day. And every single time we line up against that school, it's like this," Hester said of the close contest. "We expect it to be like this. Was it ugly? Yes, but a lot of playoff football games are.
"The penalties, the special team errors – that's not us. Those were big errors that could have cost us a football game tonight. I'm proud of our resiliency and desire to play another game. We're going to have to play better to keep moving on."
The Raptors improved to 9-2 overall and will have to clean up the mental errors as the win advances them to the second-round next week. That entails a 200-mile trip to undefeated Collierville (11-0), a team that ended the Independence season with a 44-13 win Friday night.
