Football wins annual "Menno Bowl" over Tabor for third straight season
Bethel improves to 8-1 on the season and in conference play.
HILLSBORO — The Thresher football team improved to 8-1 after beating Tabor, 31-14, on Saturday afternoon. While the Bluejays only had 158 yards during the game, the Bethel offense had 387 yards total with 316 rushing yards.
Within the first drive of the game, the Threshers already found themselves on the board with a 34-yard rushing touchdown by senior Chantz Scurry. This drive only took Bethel two minutes and 46 seconds.
With Tabor’s first drive of the game, the Threshers forced them to punt, but when Bethel got the ball back, the Bluejay defense stepped in front of one of quarterback DJ Ciers’ passes and took the intercepted ball to the endzone to put themselves on the board and tie the game up at seven.
On the next Thresher drive, Ciers redeemed himself with a 42-yard rushing touchdown of his own to put Bethel up, 14-7. Ciers again made his presence known in the second quarter of the game when he ran two runs of 15-plus yards, the second being straight to the end zone for another touchdown to extend Bethel’s lead to 21-7.
The rest of the half was a battle of the defenses which eventually led to a Tabor touchdown after they forced a Thresher fumble, bringing the score to 21-14 going into halftime.
At the beginning of the second half, senior Trey Palmer would land his sixth interception of the season, giving Bethel the ball at the Bluejay 46-yard line. The Threshers then capitalized with two long runs which led to Ciers tallying a one-yard touchdown to bring the score to 28-14.
“We kept getting in bad positions and we just kept capitalizing on it and I decided to make a play on the ball,” Palmer said. “We went in at halftime and the coaches got on us a little bit. Then we had to come out and dominate and get back to Thresher football.”
At the start of the fourth quarter, Tucker Smith caught a 39-yard pass — the only receiving yards that Bethel would need in the contest — which led to a Logan DeMond field goal of 35 yards to bring the score to 31-14.
Tabor tried to rally back for the rest of the game, but couldn’t quite catch momentum leaving the Threshers with nothing else to do but to sing Father Abraham once again.
“I’m super proud of our guys coming on and continuing to fight and getting another win again, [making us] one step closer to making the committee have a hard decision on whether they can let us enter [the playoffs],” head coach A.B. Stokes said.
Bethel will end regular season play on Saturday at 1 p.m. when they take on Saint Mary at Thresher Stadium.