WINTERSVILLE — Coaches often talk about the improvement a team makes from the first week of the season to the second.

Indian Creek showed Friday night exactly big that improvement can be, bouncing back from a Week 1 loss to top visiting East Liverpool, 26-14, in a game in which it never trailed.

“We needed to get things turned around,” Indian Creek head coach Andrew Connor said. “We needed this one. On both sides of the ball, we played physical football and we finished, not only drives, but finished the game.

“We always talk about what kind of improvement the team makes from Week 1 to Week 2. We needed to assert ourselves more (after last week) and we did.

“You really don’t want to start off 0-2, so this is really big for us. You want to stem the tide. This was a Buckeye 8 North game, they had beaten us the last two years, and we wanted to get back to where we were at. This was a big game for us.”

Zion McGee ran for 195 yards and three scores for the now 1-1 Redskins, including a 40-yard sprint to the end zone in the first quarter that opened the scoring.

He a 13-yard scoring run in the second quarter and a 2-yard plunge in the third, while helping his team rack up 266 rushing yards a week after being held off the scoreboard.

“He runs hard and finishes his runs,” Connor said. “The offensive line opened up some holes for him and he finished. He would be the first to say the offensive line got it going for him.”

As good as the ground game was, the Creek defense held the Potters, who also left Kettlewell Stadium with a 1-1 record, to 162 rush yards and just 48 passing yards, forcing the Potters to punt five times and turn the ball over on downs twice.

“We stressed to our kids to be better fundamentally on defense, and we really were,” Connor said. “Our coaches did a great job. East Liverpool is a good football team, they have a big, physical offensive line and we played really well up front. We made them really earn everything and I think we kind of wore them out towards the end.

“East Liverpool never quit, give them credit. They kept coming at us and they presented a lot of challenges for us.”

After both teams sputtered on their early possessions, Indian Creek opened the scoring with McGee’s 40-yard touchdown run. The Potters answered with a 5-yard Michael Harty run, but conversion failed leaving Creek up 7-6.

The Redskins added another long score, this time a 34-yard Sal Barcalow to Caleb Bodo pass and run, on the first drive of the second quarter to go up 14-6, before a 13-yard McGee run later in the quarter made it 20-6 Redskins at halftime.

East Liverpool got within 20-14 with a 23-yard Gavin Wright run set up by a fumble recovery on a fake punt, but Creek answered with McGee’s third score of the game to make it 26-14, which ended up being the final.

McGee led the Redskins with 195 yards on 29 carried, while the Potters got 46 yards on six carries from Harty and 39 yards on five totes from Landon Knight.

“We worked hard all week for this game, we knew it was an important game for both teams,” East Liverpool head coach Don Phillips said. “Indian Creek was hungry to win and we did not meet the challenge. We’ve got to rise to the occasion and we did not.

“We had opportunities, we’ve got to get better at taking advantage of those opportunities.”

UP NEXT

East Liverpool: Returns home to host Salem.

Indian Creek: Travels across the river to face rival Brooke, who won its opener Friday at Ripley.