Porter’s Chapel Academy kept grinding out yards on the ground, and finally found a hard-nosed defense to go with it.

After giving up 74 and 58 points in its first two games, Porter’s Chapel held Prentiss Christian to only one touchdown on Friday and won 22-8 for its first victory of the season.

Hunter Simms and Conley Johnston had eight tackles and one tackle for loss each. Morris Bailey and Chad Fuson both had seven tackles, while John Austin White and Carson Hays totaled five apiece. Fuson also had three pass breakups.

PCA stopped Prentiss Christian on three drives inside the red zone.

“A lot of the things we worked on in practice finally started to click tonight. Really good defensive line play. We did a lot better controlling the line of scrimmage on the defensive side of the ball. We’ve done it on the offensive side of the ball for two weeks but we weren’t carrying it over to the defensive side,” PCA coach Blake Purvis said. “We had a lot of tackles for loss and played in their backfield a lot, and got some stops. Just much better technique and fundamentals defensively tonight.”

Jase Jung had another big night running the ball for the Eagles. The senior running back carried it 31 times for 252 yads and three touchdowns — a 61-yarder on the first play of the game, and 10- and 8-yard runs in the second half.
Jung now has 1,049 yards and 14 touchdowns in the first three games of the season. He has rushed for at least 250 yards in all of them.

Jung spearheaded a key drive in the second half that lasted nearly eight minutes. After PCA stopped Prentiss inside the 20-yard line midway through the third quarter, the Eagles marched the other way down the field and took a 16-0 lead on Jung’s 10-yard TD run with about eight minutes to go in the fourth.

“We didn’t gash them, but we were still having productive plays and shortening the game,” Purvis said.

Prentiss answered with a touchdown, but PCA put it away with Jung’s 8-yard TD late in the fourth quarter. Although it wasn’t pretty, Purvis said he’ll take the win after two frustrating losses to start the season. PCA goes on the road next week to face Riverdale.

“A win’s a win. They’re hard to come by. I don’t care what level of football you play or where you’re at, wins are good any way you can get them,” Purvis said. “But defensively we came up with some big stops. We were a bend, don’t break. They moved the ball on us, but we had two or three stops inside the 10-yard line. We had some younger guys that really stepped up and played a key role tonight.”