Wants a challenge: Wildcat cornerback wants to guard the best receiver

Abbeville High’s McKinsey Nicholas pulls no punches when he talks about playing cornerback on defense.
“I feel that it’s the hardest position on the field,” he said. “You never know exactly what the receiver has in mind of what he wants to do with you.
“You never know until he starts running his route. That’s why I love what I do. I love playing cornerback. I have to fight hard because there are many good wide receivers that I have to go up against. You have to turn up and be ready every play.”
That’s why Nicholas loves being on the island, as they say.
He loves covering receivers one-on-one.
“It’s the challenge,” Nicholas said. “It’s being at that disadvantage in the beginning of a play and then turning it around and coming up with the break up or the interception.
“You took the disadvantage and made it into your advantage.”
Even with that, Nicholas got burned last year.
“I got burned one time by a receiver,” he said. “And even then, it wasn’t a burn. He just went up and caught the ball over me.”
Nicholas is good at playing cornerback. That’s why Abbeville head coach Roderick Moy puts him out there.
“He is the prototypical lockdown cornerback,” the AHS coach said. “He will take away one receiver and lock down one side of the field. That makes it easier for the rest of the defense to take away something else. We know what McKinsey will do, and that helps us overall.”
Nicholas doesn’t lack confidence on the field.
“I want to cover the other team’s No. 1 receiver,” he said. “I know that I can take him out of the game.”
Moy concurs.
“The teams we face have to know where McKinsey is at all times,” Moy said. “He has to be accounted for on defense, and he’s the person that opposing offensive coordinators have to account for him when game-planning for us.”
Nicholas said that playing last season was rough as it didn’t feel like a football team when you have to split up into groups for practice.
But that changed once Friday night came around.
“Once Fridays came around, we were together and playing as a team,” he said.
The 6-foot tall, 155-pound senior running a 4.5 second, 40 yard dash is looking forward to his senior year for the Wildcats.
“I looking for a good record, getting better at what I do and hopefully get a scholarship to play college ball,” he said. “I want to go far in the playoffs. I want to get five to 10 interceptions.
“I only had one last year, but I had a lot of stops and batted down several passes.
“I want to jam people off the line more to make them look bad.”
But Nicholas is also a team player through and through, as he showed last year against St. Martinville.
“One of my teammates, who I had been helping to learn the position, was a small guy, maybe 5-foot-5,” he said. “But he was covering a guy who was 6-foot-1, and he came to me and asked me to cover him instead.
“It was a fourth-down play, and we switched in the middle of the play, and I stopped him on the play for a big stop in the game. I broke up the pass for the stop. That’s how you help the team.”