Bellefontaine celebrates one of its many scores during Friday’s 55-21 win over Sidney. (Press Pros Feature Photos by Angie Greenwood)
The Chieftains won with a new quarterback with a familiar last name, a familiar running back named Carter Caudill and a strong defensive effort, while Sidney took the field with a new coach and is learning what it means to play hard for four quarters.
By Marcus Hartman for Press Pros
Bellefontaine, OH — The opening week of high school football tends to be a mix of the new and familiar.
That was very much the case Friday night in Bellefontaine for the Chieftains and visiting Sidney.
The bottom line: Bellefontaine still had a St. Clair at quarterback and Carter Caudill on both sides of the ball. Coach Jason Brown’s team will need more to achieve its goals, but that was plenty to open 1-0 against a rebuilding Yellow Jackets squad.
“The offensive line and the running back, they can be a quarterback’s best friend, right?” Brown said after his team prevailed 55-21 in the 118th meeting between the two schools. “So it was great to get everybody moving forward, get some positive momentum and energy as we move into week No. 2. Thought our young quarterback played well tonight.”
The young quarterback is Reign St. Clair, a sophomore and younger brother of Tavien St. Clair, who is a freshman at Ohio State after being one of the top 10 prospects in the country last season. He took the Chieftains to a 27-9 record the last two seasons, and their goal is to not only maintain that level but raise the bar for the program.
If his brother needs time to get used to being The Man, he just has to hand off to Caudill, a 5-9, 213-pound senior they call Bulldog. He ran for 1,040 yards last season and went for 120 on Friday night. Caudill was particularly effective near the goal line, finding his way into the end zone six times on runs of 3, 2, 5, 16, 53 and 1.
Interested onlooker…Ohio State’s Tavien St. Clair dropped in Friday to watch younger brother Reign quarterback the Chieftains to a win over Sidney.
“I just follow my blocks and allow my linemen to do the work and just cut off them and it opens everything up,” said Caudill, who is also the team’s best defensive player from his middle linebacker spot. “So it’s great.
“We definitely have some room for improvement on both sides of the ball, but I definitely think we played fine. We’ll watch it on film tomorrow. Our mess-ups, we’ll learn from those.”
For Sidney, the leaky defense of last season remained an issue, but the Yellow Jackets did some good things in their first game under head coach Kyle Coleman. The best stuff happened when new starting quarterback Quinten Graves handed the ball off to one of several slippery running backs.
Jamari Combs ran 22 times for 118 yards, and Ishhod Diomande added 66 yards on seven carries. Sidney was able to move the ball (331 total yards, including 215 on the ground), but the Jackets gave up 524 yards.
“It’s all new, but I think a lot of the communication in the offseason from coaches and players was just the difficulty of the defense last year,” said Coleman, who spent two seasons at Minster but was defensive coordinator at Sidney from 2015-22.
He installed a 3-4 scheme with small, quick outside linebackers, but they had little success slowing down the thunder (Caudill) or the lightning (St. Clair and his receivers) in Bellefontaine.
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“We wanted to try to simplify for our kids, to get them playing faster. I feel like our kids have been picking it up well,” Coleman said. “I thought we got under the lights tonight and made some mistakes, which we know is going to happen game one, but we’ve got to continue to play hard and run to the football and play with the fundamentals of defense. You’ve got to get off blocks. You’ve got to tackle well. You’ve got to run to the ball. You know, it’s all those little things, and we just didn’t do that well enough consistently tonight. So that’s going to have to be a focus for us this week.”
Bellefontaine largely controlled play in the first half, but the Yellow Jackets scored twice in the last 5:10 of the second quarter to stay in the game.
Bellefontaine quarterback Reign St. Clair unloads under pressure during Friday’s opening win over Sidney.
Diomande slipped into the end zone on a draw play from four yards out to get Sidney on the board, then Demarcuse Fleming fully laid out to catch a 23-yard pass from Graves in the end zone as time expired to make it 21-14. The first touchdown came on a short field after the Chiefs fumbled at their own 21, but the second was an 80-yard effort that started with 3:47 on the clock. It looked dead after back-to-back negative plays, but Graves spiked the ball on third down with six seconds left to save time for one last play, Fleming’s great catch.
The hosts blew the game open with a pair of touchdowns in the first five minutes of the third quarter — both on passes from St. Clair to Sutton Daring.
The first came on a slant over the middle that covered 10 yards. Daring did most of the work on the second, catching a screen pass near the visitors sideline then winding his way to the other side of the field before finding the end zone.
The Jackets helped the hosts regain control by fumbling away the opening kickoff of the second half, then they faded in the final moments as Caudill tacked on his last two touchdowns.
His early running took some pressure off St. Clair, whose older brother was on hand with Ohio State still a week away from opening the season against No. 1 Texas.
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“I actually didn’t know he was going to be here,” Reign said after completing 19 of 25 passes for 329 yards and two touchdowns. “It was different coming out here (as the starter). Before the game, I was just, like, constantly looking around, where’s he at? Because I would warm up with him, you know? But he wasn’t there, so then it was like, ‘Yeah, I really got it. You know, this is really my time.’”
In his first start, he displayed the ability to do everything within the Chieftains’ offense, including throw on the run off a boot pass that led to several big plays.
“He made some really good throws at times,” Brown said. “I mean, we dropped a couple on him to be honest. A couple touchdowns that we just flat dropped. So there’s a couple big plays that we’ve left out there on the table, and defensively, we gave up a couple of big plays.”
Sidney running back Jamari Combs busts through a Bellefontaine tackle attempt for yards in Friday’s game with the Chieftains.
Next up for Bellefontaine is a trip to Bellbrook, a program Brown considers a measuring stick.
“Great program that came up here and got us last year,” Brown said in reference to a 35-14 loss in Week 2 of 2024. “So for us it’s a situation where we want to go down there and and put our best foot forward, continue to grow, continue to get better. Mature. We’re trying to push the standard higher, but it’s going to be a great challenge, and in 24 hours, we got to turn the page and get ready to play.”
Sidney will also head south to Greene County next Friday for a matchup with Fairborn.
“We’re replacing a lot on both sides of the football, so when a guy hasn’t been under the Friday night lights, I mean, that’s different,” Coleman said. “So takes some time, you know? So we want our kids to practice hard. We want to play hard, and I don’t know if we did that for four quarters tonight. So we’ve definitely got to evaluate that. I told the kids after the game everybody in our huddle there has to go home tonight and take a real strong look in the mirror. And that’s coaches all the way down to the last guy on the roster. We’ve got to evaluate ourselves and say, ‘What can I do to make us better?’
“That’s got to be our mindset this week moving forward into Week 2.”
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