Porters Chapel showed plenty of improvement on Friday night.

It still wasn’t enough to hang with one of the top teams in the ranks of the Mississippi Association of Independent Schools.

R.J. Fleming ran for 160 yards and two touchdowns — including a scintillating 96-yarder in the first quarter — and Kent King added two more scores as Trinity beat PCA 30-0 at Eagles Field.

Despite the one-sided score, PCA held Trinity to 256 yards of total offense and did a good job bottling up Fleming. It was a vast difference from last week’s 35-point loss to University Christian, when PCA allowed five touchdowns on 16 first-half plays. Trinity (5-0), the top-ranked team in Class A, was simply too fast and too talented for the Eagles (2-4) to overcome.

“We seemed like more of a team and knew our jobs better. It was all of us realizing we have a good team and we just need to put the pieces together,” said PCA’s Reed Gordon, who caught three passes for 31 yards and also had seven tackles and a sack on defense. “It’s good and bad. You never want to lose. But we did show a lot of improvements.”

Good and bad also describes the game’s first touchdown.

An illegal block and a fumbled handoff forced Trinity into a second-and-35 situation from its own 4-yard line. Fleming, lined up at quarterback, took a direct snap and broke into the secondary. He cut to the left sideline, evaded a tackle near midfield and cut back toward the right side, juked another in the open field at the PCA 30, then shooed away one last defender for a 96-yard touchdown run that gave the Saints a 7-0 lead. As he crossed the goal line, Fleming finally collapsed in a heap from exhaustion. Including his cross-field running, he traveled nearly 200 yards on the play.

“My legs would not move at all” at the end, a smiling Fleming said.

Trinity added another touchdown on a 9-yard run by King late in the first quarter, and stretched the lead to 16-0 when a PCA punt snap sailed out of the end zone for a safety just before halftime.

Fleming scored his second touchdown on a 4-yard run in the third quarter as the Saints crept away, and King got his second touchdown on a 39-yard run on the first play of the fourth quarter to make it 30-0.

As well as its defense played, the Eagles’ offense couldn’t make any headway against Trinity to get them back in the game. PCA had minus-18 yards of offense in the first half — largely because of three fumbles that were recovered well behind the line of scrimmage — and only four first downs in the game.

PCA’s best drive was its first of the second half. Four straight runs by Montana McDaniel and a 7-yard reception by Gordon moved the ball to the Trinity 36. McDaniel was unable to convert a short pass into a first down on fourth-and-5, however, and the ball was turned over on downs. It was one of only two times PCA had the ball inside Trinity territory. The other was a drive that started at the Saints’ 29-yard line.

“The thing that showed up was their speed. They closed in,” PCA coach Bill Fleming said. “We were going to do some play-action passes and we had it set up. Whenever they saw anything like that, their weakside backer came and put pressure on (quarterback) Colby (Rushing) immediately.”

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Contact Ernest Bowker at ebowker@vicksburgpost.com