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Show Foul Lines By TOM HARALDSEN Clipper Sports Editor Another Kitt award is much deserved for Wildcat player t started way back in August, about the time that Kitt Rawlings himself began chewing up the yards as he and his teammates at Woods Cross High embarked on the school's best-ever football campaign. cam-paign. We ran a couple of pictures of Kitt on the sports page, and you can guess the rest. The calls began coming in week after week, as a few disgruntled parents, presumably from other schools, lodged complaints that we were one-sided, that we were only covering one school, and worse, one athlete. Trust me, never in the history of the Clipper have either 1 or my predecessor, Dave Wigham, ever been accused of favoring anyone besides Bountiful High. But the dust has settled now. I've put the few complaints in the "I don't really give a damn department," and the football season has blended into basketball. Still, one last look at Rawlings accomplishments ac-complishments seems deserved, particularly in light of the fact that Kitt was named this week as the 1989 Gatorade Circle of Champions Utah Football Player of the Year by the Quaker Oats Company. Scott Mitchell once won this award, so you can see how prestigious it is. Here's a review of what he did on the field: Rushing: 256 carries for 2192 yards (including a revised total of 423 in the game with Bountiful, plus 289 versus Granite and 275 versus ver-sus Mountain Crest). Receiving: 22 catches for 380 yards. Kick off returns: 16 for 372 yards. Punt returns:1 20 for 323 yards. All purpose yards: 3267 in 314 attempts, a 10.4 yard per carry average. This equates to 251.31 yards per game. In rushing, he averaged 8.56 per carry or 168.2 per game. Receptions were 17.3 yards per catch, kickoff returns averaged 23.3 yards, and punt returns 16.2. More importantly, Rawlings scored 27 touchdowns and three two-point two-point conversions, for 168 points. This was more points than several entire teams scored all season in Utah. Perhaps that's why Rawlings was a team co-captain, was ESPN and Hardee's "Utah High School Athlete of the Month" in October, was the Deseret News' "Athlete of the Month" in October, was a first-team running back in both Salt Lake papers and voted Region Six's Most Valuable Player this year. Kitt also was named to the All-Clipper team for a second straight year and was co-MVP this season, and set several school and state records. There aren't many athletes who have that kind of season, and Kitt Rawlings tertainly deserved all the coverage he received in this paper and Others, and more. Somewhere next fall, other sports writers will be able to cover his athletic exploits. In the meantime, I'm grateful that he performed here, in our area, and congratulate him on an outstanding season. As sometimes happens, we overlooked a player who deserved recognition rec-ognition on Our All-Clipper football team. Travis Edgar of Davis High was the team's leading tackier, and his name failed to appear in . our story last week. We apologize. And there were two Woods Cross players whose photos did not appear because they were not available for our photo shoot and didn't bring in pictures. Garrett Atkin and Mike Hawley were members of the elite team, and their names appeared ap-peared in our story, but not their faces. Sorry about that, guys. |