Llanes Dickerson having breakout season for West Harrison

Through five weeks of the high school football season, the player with the most total touchdowns in all of Mississippi might come as a bit of a surprise.

Not because he’s not that good, he is, it’s just Llanes Dickerson is more of a team guy, but his video game numbers are getting too hard to ignore as we introduce you to West Harrison’s breakout running back.

“I mean, honestly. I’ve been doing this a long time and no disrespect to anybody else, but he’s the best kid I’ve ever coached.”

Second-year Head Man Quincy Patrick has coached his fair share of division I athletes, but Llanes Dickerson is on the brink of setting the kind of school records at West Harrison that won’t be touched for a long time. And it was flying completely under the radar until recently. “Actually, I’m not even going to lie, I didn’t look at it like that. Somebody had told me, like you’ve got a lot of touchdowns. You’ve got like 17 or 18. I was like, oh for real? So I went and looked it up.”

What Dickerson found was 14 touchdowns rushing, two receiving, and one kick-off return for a grand total of 17 through just four games. That’s tops in the entire state for any classification and good for a regular season pace of more than 46 trips to the end zone. “No, I hadn’t thought about no pace. But one of the freshmen, he calculated it and he did all of that type of stuff and I was like okay, cool. I’m just trying to win.”

“He kind of mentioned it jokingly. Like I said, he’s such a team player. He never mentions his stats. I think one of the coaches told us, and he was like what can we do to get better as a team? That’s the kind of kid he is.”

He’s also the kind of kid that runs a 4.5 40-yard dash and gets it done in the classroom. Not to mention, Dickerson is only six ticks shy of 1,000 all-purpose yards, leaving his stat sheet, looking more like a Sudoku puzzle, but perhaps the most puzzling number of all is zero, the amount of division I scholarship offers Dickerson currently has on the table.  “The kid is special. I mean he really is. And for him to not have a D1 scholarship offer yet is baffling to me. I can say he’s the best kid I’ve ever coached in my entire life. I mean he’s that special. And I tell everybody whoever gets this kid is going to get a special kid. He’s awesome.”

“Yeah, it’s a little chip on the shoulder because like everybody has got something to say once you do good so it’s like okay, I got you. I’ll show you this week.”

As for team success, West Harrison is still trying to find its footing at 1-3 overall. Thanks in large part to Dickerson’s 17 touchdowns accounting for all but five of West Harrison’s total as a team, the Hurricanes are on pace to score more than 250 points more than they did in 2018.

They’ll get their first taste of 6A action on Friday at Harrison Central.