Vikings football can use second empty title trip as a building block

RALEIGH | Kinston is known for its basketball and after 10 championships — six in the last eight years — and at least a half-dozen players to make an NBA roster, there’s no way to deny that tradition.

But today, the Vikings football team can boast two trips to the NCHSAA 2A football championship in the last five years and perhaps the foundation to a sustainable football program, the likes of which Lenoir County has never experienced — at least not in the 50-plus years of prep football results archived by The Free Press.

“We’re looking for bigger things to come, consistency and no turnover (in personnel),” third-year Vikings coach Ryan Gieselman said following Saturday’s 57-21 defeat at the hands of Shelby. “That sick feeling we’re feeling right now, it has to be the driving force to help us get over the hump.”

Junior Kam’ryn Webster caught two passes for 30 yards and attempted a pair of passes on trick plays — both of which were broken up by an extra-athletic effort by a Shelby defender. And he’ll return to the field to lead the Vikings as a senior in less than eight months.

“We have to try to keep everyone here, we need to build on (the championship game loss),” Webster said. “We’ll start in the spring and we have to keep working. We hate losing; to lose this game on this stage, it hurts.”

In 2016, the Vikings will return more than two dozen underclassmen to compete in a historically underachieving Eastern Carolina 2A conference — and perhaps make a return trip to the triangle to compete for a state title.

Can the third time be a charm and does it even matter at a basketball school?

“We had a lot of younger guys on our team that had success this year, they’ve shown what buying into our process, if you buy in whole-heartedly, can do,” Gieselman, who is an assistant coach on Kinston’s four-time defending NCHSAA 2A basketball championship team, said. “We’ll have 10-15 guys who play JV or varsity basketball — basketball and football, at a high level, can coexist at Kinston High School.”

But what some may not remember is there was a time, not too long ago (circa 2007), that many wondered if the Vikings basketball team was capable of winning the big one on the hardwood.

After winning NCHSAA basketball championship in 1965 — the schools fourth — the Vikings went nearly five decades with only three appearances in the title game (1992, 2001 and 2007) and without any hardware to bring back to Lenoir County.

Junior Jarquez Bizzell, was named Kinston’s defensive player of the championship game, and believes the team, which finished the season 15-1, has plenty of room to get better. He finished the championship game with 10 tackles and a broken up pass.

“We have to continue improve,” he said minutes after the final buzzer went off at Carter Finley Stadium. “We’re motivated, we can do anything we want if we put our minds to it, we can make it a football school.”