On Thursday Aug. 31 the varsity football team put on a show, soundly beating the Austin High Maroons 49-14 at the historic House Park in downtown Austin. This out-of-district win starts the Warriors off with a 2-0 record going into the last week of non-district play. The past 7 games Westwood has played against the Maroons they have won by more than 14 points, with their last loss to Austin being in 2010. With this game, the Maroons will have to wait another year to try to break that streak.

“Any time you can win a football team you wanna look back and just continue to get better and better,” Head Coach Anthony Wood said. “We want to make sure that our victory doesn’t get to our head, we wanna just continue to work hard.”

The game started off with a pair of long kick returns followed by a pair of breakout runs by Demani Stewart ‘24, taking them both to the endzone to give the Warriors a quick 14-7 lead after an Austin High touchdown. With each team demonstrating their ability to score quickly, both teams slowed down their game hoping to catch the other off guard, settling down for the rest of the quarter.

The scoring finally did continue with the Warriors capitalizing on the Maroons’ defensive mistakes at the beginning of the second quarter. Using their quick passing and strong running game the Warriors put up 35 unanswered points in the first 10 minutes of the second quarter, and blew the Maroons out of their sights.

“I think we have the right makeup with great players and excellent coaches,” Coach Wood said. “All we gotta do is focus down on what we can do and I believe that we’ll do great in out next game”

In the second half, while the Maroons were trying to play catch-up, the only goal for the Warriors was to kill the clock and keep their huge lead. They accomplished just that with short but effective runs up the middle leading to long first downs. The Warriors took 9 minutes off the clock with their first drive of the half, eating up over half of the third quarter. The Warrior defense held strong for the entire win, with 14 points given up in the whole game. The turnover differential was also substantial for the Warriors, nabbing a few stripped fumbles as well as some well-timed interceptions, frustrating the Maroon offense.

The Warriors will play again next week on Sept. 8, going to Bastrop to face the Bears for the third game of the season.