Western Hills picks up first win of the season with rout of Diamond Hill-Jarvis
Fort Worth Western Hills running back Jason Green rushed for 162 yards and three touchdowns as the Cougars downed Fort Worth Diamond Hill-Jarvis, 57-12, in the District 6-4A Division I opener Thursday night at Clark Stadium.
Western Hills (1-2 overall, 1-0 in district) opened West Zone play on a high note. The district elected to split into two four-team zones to help modify the season because of the coronavirus pandemic.
The two zones will conduct playoff seeding games the weekend of Oct. 9 and then continue the season with cross-zone games to complete the regular season.
The Cougars jumped out to a 28-0 lead on TD runs of one and four yards by Green, a 24-yard scoring run by sophomore quarterback Keyon Butler, and a 10-yard interception return by Caleb Clark.
“We really needed some confidence and a game like this is a real confidence builder,” said Western Hills coach Blake Moilan, whose team had two lopsided losses to open the season. “We feel like we have a pretty good team on both sides of the ball. We have a lot of guys coming back, but we needed to get out there and do some good things and on both sides of the ball I felt that we did.”
Diamond Hill-Jarvis (0-2, 0-1) found a spark midway through the third quarter.
A fumble recovery by Rodman Estrada gave the Eagles the ball at the Western Hills 49. Five plays later DH-J scored its first points of the season on a 25-yard pass from Robert Tre’ Sheffield to Jovoni Cobos.
The 28-6 lead was cut even further when DH-J’s Ricky Perez returned a fumble 85 yards for a score on the Cougars ensuing series.
But that was as close as the Eagles would get despite another fumble recovery by DH-J’s Alfredo Rivera with 1:55 left in the third quarter.
“We struggle with adversity and we had some out there tonight,” said Moilan. “In the past we would continue that snowball, but we talked about that this week. West was a very good football team (59-7 loss) and Lake Worth was a very good football team (56-7 loss), but when the snowball started we couldn’t stop it.”
Green’s 9-yard run in the last minute of the third quarter gave Western Hills a 36-12 lead. The Cougars put up 21 fourth-quarter points to put the game away.
“The kids did a great job of turning that around and they responded,” said Moilan of the 29-unanswered points by the Cougars late. “That’s what we asked them to do all week was when things go bad, respond.”