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Walled Lake Western hands Waterford Kettering its first loss, WLW 44 - Kettering 0

By By DREW ELLIS, 09/14/15, 12:30AM EDT

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WATERFORD – Knowing that Waterford Kettering had a comeback win last week against Novi, Walled Lake Western football coach Mike Zdebski wasn’t going to give the Captains any breathing room on Friday night.

The Warriors jumped out first on the Captains and never looked back, rolling to a 44-0 victory on the road to give them a 3-0 start to the season and 1-0 start to KLAA play.

“That was a good Kettering team that has good speed at the skill positions, but it looks like we are pretty fast too,” Zdebski said. “We saw on tape that (Kettering) had a lot of explosive plays so we felt like that meant they were fast at getting to the edge, but we had a lot of disciplined play on defense and moved to the ball.”

Friday’s game at Kettering was part of Armed Forces Day. The Captains sported uniforms with camouflage numbers and the school raised money for the Wounded Warriors Project, which is a military and veterans’ charity service organization empowering injured veterans and their families. Prior to the start of the game, injured veteran Shane Parsons did the honorary coin toss for the contest. Parsons was injured in Iraq in 2006 while serving as part of the Army’s infantry brigade. Members of all forms of the military were also present throughout the stadium.

When the game got started, Western took over quickly, scoring on its second possession on a 3-yard touchdown run from Jake Prokes. Kicker John Camilleri added the PAT and had a 31-yard field goal early in the second quarter to make it 10-0.

Quarterback Kyle Thomas got his first touchdown pass of the game with 1:09 left in the half as he connected with Javon Gabriel for a 6-yard score to make it 16-0. 

“I liked the way they played after last week. Last week was really sloppy,” Zdebski said of his team. “We had a lot of turnovers, a lot of penalties, really, a lot of penalties. We really cut back on that and made significant improvements in that area and just did a lot of good things on both sides of the ball.”

Thomas would manage another touchdown pass with three seconds left in the half, connecting with Cody White for a 74-yard score. White had to make an acrobatic catch and break away from a tackler to get the score.

“We figured we would throw it up to the kid that has an offer to the University of Wisconsin. He’s a pretty good athlete and you can see that catch…that was a pretty great play right there. That is why he has that kind of an offer,” Zdebski said of the touchdown to White.

Kettering couldn’t get much going on offense as a 44-yard run from Evan King was the lone explosive play the Captains had in the first half.

Western pushed its lead to 30-0 early in the third when Thomas connected with White again for a 15-yard score, the third and final touchdown pass for Thomas in the contest.

“He’s making better decisions and he’s throwing it quickly when he should. As you can see, he will take some chances and he can make something out of nothing sometimes,” Zdebski said of Thomas.

Jack Dodge added a 48-yard punt return for a touchdown and White threw a 21-yard touchdown pass to Jacob McCarthy in the fourth quarter for the final Western score.

Thomas finished 15-of-23 passing for 242 yards while White had four receptions for 104 yards for the Warriors.

After starting the season with three road games, Western will get a chance to play in front of its home crowd next week when it hosts Lakeland.

Waterford Kettering will look to bounce back from its first loss when it travels to Walled Lake Central next Friday.

Kettering coach Shaun Warner declined comment following the game.

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Tag(s): News  Walled Lake Western  WLW JV  WLW Freshmen