In the course of 48 frightening minutes, Dale Ross and his Westhill football teammates conveyed exactly the sort of emphatic message it wanted to give to anyone else that wants the Class B West championship.
Going to Homer last Friday night, the Warriors ran the ball with purpose and scored whenever it wanted to.
By the time it was done, Westhill had a 61-7 victory, leaving Homer in shambles — and forcing the rest of the league contenders scrambling to find ways of keeping Ross from doing the same kind of damage to them.
From the time he went 56 yards for a touchdown in the first quarter, Ross owned the night, not stopping until he had set a new career mark with 322 yards and six TD’s — and all six of those scores came in the first half.
As it turned out, the Warriors’ 14-0 first-quarter advantage (Ross going 10 yards for the other score) was just a warm-up.
For in the second quarter, Westhill piled up 33 points and notched five touchdowns, four of them from Ross.
And these weren’t puny goal-line dives, either. The shortest Ross touchdowns were a pair of 26-yard scampers. He also scored from 30 yards out and, in a rare case where Westhill was stuck deep in its own territory, took care of that problem by going 81 yards for six more points.
About the only thing the Warriors didn’t pull off was preserving the shutout. It even got some work done in the air, too, as junior quarterback Mike DeCarr went 85 yards to Jake Burgess for one TD, 15 yards to Burgess for the other.
Westhill now seeks the same time of damage Friday nigh, when it meets Jordan-Elbridge in its home opener at 6:30. The Eagles began with its own romp, crushing LaFayette/Fabius-Pompey 63-8 as Joe Poppe got 200 yards and four touchdowns and Mitch Merrill added 125 yards. Containing Poppe is the key to keeping J-E from causing too much of a scare.
