WALES – The long drive to Wales in September agrees with the Mt. Desert Island football team.

For the second year in a row, the Trojans had an early season matchup at Oak Hill, and for the second straight year picked up the victory. This year’s road trip yielded a 48-19 drubbing of the Raiders.

“Our line is, ‘any win is a good win, especially a road win,'” said MDI coach Mark Shields. “Oak Hill has been a playoff-caliber team, and they have some athletes. They’re big up front, and we knew that we needed to play hard to beat them.”

MDI (2-0) spread the ball around, with senior quarterback Sean Parady (7-8, 115 yards) tossing a pair of scoring strikes, including a 3-yarder to Collin Walton as time expired in the first half. Tailback Jonathan Hall added 112 yards and two more scores on the ground, while fullback Chris Ward killed the clock in the second half with 68 yards and six points. Odane Gaynor added 63 yards rushing, and Tyler Murphy scored the final MDI touchdown late in the fourth quarter.

The Trojan defense was solid as well, bottling up Raider back Adam Tremblay (48 yards, one touchdown) and intercepting a pair of passes by senior signal-caller Josh Jillson. MDI also recovered an Oak Hill fumble early in the second half. Joey Gilbert scored a pair of touchdowns to go with 14 yards.

“We’re still a very young as far as football experience goes,” said Raider coach Bruce Nicholas. “They have 19 seniors on their side of the ball, and they played that way today. We’re still passive, we played on our heels at times today, and last week we didn’t.”

The Trojans came out ahead in a wild second quarter. Gilbert scored Oak Hill’s first touchdown 11 minutes later. The Raiders recovered a fumble on MDI’s first play of the ensuing drive, but turned over the ball themselves on downs four plays later. Hall restored the Trojans’ two touchdown cushion on a 4-yard scamper to cap a 12-play, 74-yard drive.

Jillson rallied Oak Hill with a 58-yard hookup with Gilbert on the next series. Gilbert added his second touchdown of the quarter with 1:24 remaining.

Instead of running out the time remaining in the half, the Trojans put the ball in the air themselves. Parady hit Terrence Jones on a fly route for 47 yards, and dumped a ball over the middle to Vincent Moore for 18 more yards. Parady snapped the ball with 1.7 seconds left to play. Parady found Walton all alone at the left side of the end zone after time expired to make it 22-12.

Oak Hill received the ball to start the third quarter but was forced to punt from deep in their own territory.

“That was a momentum killer for us,” said Jillson. “We tried to bounce back in the third quarter, but we weren’t able to score right away like we wanted to.”

The Raider defense held MDI to a three-and-out on its first possession of the half, but Tremblay fumbled the ball at midfield three plays later, leading to Ward’s 3-yard scoring plunge. After that, the rout was on.

The Raiders are hoping that the Friday night lights next week at Belfast will take some of the sting out of this week’s loss.

“Hopefully we’ll have a great game (against Belfast),” said Hutchinson. “We typically play well in Friday night games. Each year you have different teams, and you don’t know what their character is. We’ll see what we’re made off next week.”