Timberwolves Beat Mavericks to Open District Play

The South Central football team won its District 7 opener at Kiowa County 44-12 Friday night.

The Timberwolves held a 12-0 lead at halftime and the Mavericks scored on their first possession of the third quarter. But South Central responded with three scoring plays to close out the third and lead 36-6.

While head coach Brett Westrup said that his players didn’t have a great game, but noted that Kiowa County has improved a lot fro last season and challenged the Timberwolves.

“They were very physical,” Westrup said. “We had some mistakes but, obviously, we’re not going to complain a whole lot when we win.

“But there’s still a lot of things we’ve got to fix — a lot of just silly mistakes like running the wrong routes. Those kind of things where we just hurt ourselves more than Kiowa County hurt us.”

The Timberwolves also had an interception and a couple of missed blocks that killed drives. But Westruo added that Kiowa County had a lot of size.

“They were way bigger than us, and when I saw way bigger than us, they had three guys bigger than our biggest guy,” Westrup said. “That’s how much they had us outsized. I mean, they had one kid that outweighed everybody on our team by 45 pounds. And their boys did a really good job of, on defense, playing physical.”

But the head coach was happy to see the Timberwolves limit big plays and shut down the Mavericks’ passing game. Special teams also came up big for the Timberwolves, as Wiley York returned a kickoff 65 yards for a touchdown.

“We did well matching the physicality of their offensive line since they’re so much bigger than us,” Westrup said.

He added that the Timberwolves did a better job of pursuing whoever had the ball and gang tackling, something they didn’t do enough in the loss to Reno County two weeks ago.

“One of the things we emphasized after the Reno County loss, we have got to have better defensive pursuit,” Westrup said. “We’ve got to have six, seven guys to the ball making tackles and we did so much better pursuing and being a gang tackling team this week.”

On defense, Colt Yoder lead with 14 tackles, four for a loss, while Westynn Stapleton and Jack Willems each had 10, Willems getting two for a loss and two quarterback sacks.

Easton Huck completed five of 10 passes for 67 yards with a touchdown pass to Parker Price, who finished with four catches for 53 yards. Huck also rushed for 150 yards on 23 carries with a 55-yard touchdown play. Coda Lindsay had touchdown rushes of six and 23 yards, finishing with 61 yards rushing on six carries. Yoder had three carries for 57 yards, one a 52-yard touchdown run.

Westrup said things are coming together at the halfway point of the season but there are a few mental things the Timberwolves need to improve.

“You know, X’s and O’s wise, we’re playing pretty good football,” he said. “We’ve just got to clean up a few little things — make our pass routes a little bit crisper, do a little bit better job of going through our pass route progressions, doing a better job of reading our blockers and make a cut off their blocks when we’re the ball carrier. If we can clean those things up, we’ll be playing some pretty good football.”

South Central (3-1) will have a bye week this week. Westrup said that the teams that South Central could have played were Ell-Saline, Hoxie and Stanton County, but because Ell-Saline and Hoxie were close together, they decided to play each other.

“We tried to play Stanton County and they said, no, we don’t want to play,” Westrup said. “So then we tried to reach out and fill that schedule with somebody else, but there was nobody in Kansas open. We reached out to some schools in Oklahoma and nobody wanted to pick us up.”

The head coach said that the Timberwolves will use this week to clean up mental mistakes and get ready for a District 7 showdown against Central Plains in two weeks’ time. Central Plains is undefeated, 4-0, at the halfway point of the season.

“They will like to throw it — they’ve got a pretty good quarterback and so we’re gonna have to work on our defensive backs and pass coverage,” Westrup said. “So we’re just gonna work on a lot of little individual things.

“I’m a firm believer if you can get the individual things down, it makes the team time easier and so, working on going through plays and running through plays as a team and team sessions is not going to help those individuals.

The head coach said that the Timberwolves will focus on that individual work in practice, particularly when it comes to progressions with the quarterback, working on pass routes and handoffs and reading the blockers.

“That way, we can throw them together in a team session,” Westrup said.