Georgetown holds off Carvers Bay to complete county sweep

Since Carvers Bay and Georgetown first played a varsity football game in the year 2000, there have been plenty of scintillating battles between the Georgetown County rivals.

Add Friday night's thriller between the Bears and the Bulldogs at Tommy Smith Stadium to the list.

Christian Johnson scored on a 21-yard touchdown scamper with 1:22 left in the game to cap a superb second-half offensive effort by Georgetown, lifting the Bulldogs to a 34-27 victory.

“Any time Carvers Bay and Georgetown play, you can take the record books out the window,” said Georgetown coach Bradley Adams, who saw his team sweep its three Georgetown County rivals (Andrews, Waccamaw, Carvers Bay) for the second straight season. “It’s a rivalry game and everybody’s going to fight until the last tick on the clock.”

The Class A Bears (1-3) brought the fight to the Bulldogs in the first half and held a 13-7 lead at intermission.

But the Class AAA Bulldogs (3-1) came out on a mission in the second half, scoring touchdowns on all three possessions of the third quarter. Quarterback Jarvis Brown led the charge, accounting for all three third-quarter scores on runs of 38, 5 and 2 yards.

But the Bears, led by the running and passing of junior quarterback Levi White, were almost matching the Bulldogs blow for blow.

When Calvin Miller scored on a 7-yard run with just 3:31 left in the game the score was knotted at 27-all pending the extra point.

Starting when defensive lineman Terill Steele threw Deronn Clark for a loss on the two-point conversion to keep the score tied, the Bulldogs put together a string of game-winning plays in the final minutes.

First, Georgetown drove 62 yards in six plays capped by Johnson’s 21-yard run to take the 34-27 lead with 1:22 left.

After the Bears moved to a first down at midfield with less than a minute to play, Alex Smith intercepted a White pass down the sideline to secure the win for the Bulldogs (3-1).

In all, Georgetown scored touchdowns on four of five possession in the second half and missed a field goal on the other before Brown took a knee on the final two snaps of the game to run out the clock. Adams’ fast-paced offense piled up 274 yards in the second half and 390 for the game.

“We had to go to the drawing board at halftime and just make some simple adjustments to put them in situations where we felt like they’d have a hard time covering,” Adams said. “The kids were very motivated at halftime – they didn’t like where they were on the scoreboard and how they were playing. We just lit a fire under them and they came out and responded.”

The Bears controlled the action in the first half, right from the start. Quevon Dickerson intercepted Brown’s first pass of the game and two plays later, White found DiJion Goss in the corner of the end zone on a 20-yard touchdown pass to give the Bears a 7-0 lead with 9:09 left in the first quarter.

Brown found Smith over the middle for a 17-yard touchdown pass to tie the score for the Bulldogs at 7-all on the second play of the second quarter. But the Bears ran 24 plays to seven for the Bulldogs in the second quarter, taking the 13-7 halftime lead on a 1-yard keeper by White.

“We came to play tonight,” Carvers Bay coach Nate Thompson said. “We thought we had them and they did some things they caught us in some formations we couldn’t adjust to in time (in the second half) and they took advantage of it. There was some great defense being played out there but the offenses just stepped up their game tonight.”

This story was originally published September 19, 2015 at 1:14 AM with the headline "Georgetown holds off Carvers Bay to complete county sweep."