MARATHON GAME; Weather delay, stoppages lead to over 4 hour contest as G’Ville snares dominant road win at Fayetteville

By Shea Haile Courier Sports 

FAYETTEVILLE — For the second time in the season’s first three weeks, the Gordonsville High Tigers football team had a long road gridiron test affected by weather. Big Blue traveled to Lincoln County for a non-region test against Class 1A’s Fayetteville High School Tigers last Friday night. 

Following Gordonsville’s game opening drive with 10:03 left in the first quarter, game officials halted the contest because of lightning.

After over an hour of delay, both Tiger squads returned to the gridiron as Big Blue would go on to post an impressive 42-12 victory over the hosts. With the triumph, Gordonsville improved to 3-0 overall while Fayetteville fell to 0-3. More than four hours after kickoff, the Week 3 contest finally concluded at 11:19.

During their season opener at Coalfield, Gordonsville’s battle against the Yellow Jackets was called with 1:10 left in the third frame after multiple lightning delays. The contest was declared a 21-18 Gordonsville victory. 

Along with the weather impact, the contest was also marred by injuries including a significant and scary injury to GHS junior defensive back and receiver Waylon Kennedy.

The game was halted for over 30 minutes as medical personnel and trainers attended to Kennedy. 

Both teams joined at midfield before the game resumed to pray for the injured Kennedy. According to family members’ social media post over the weekend, the junior standout’s condition has improved. 

“That is why we talk to them all the time about adversity because playing in a sporting event and even in life you are going to have adversity,” said Gordonsville head coach Stephen Jackson. “We had the ligtning delay that put us back a while and then Waylon went down. We had a couple more to get injured and we ended up playing a lot of freshmen and underclassmen.”

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