Columbus East’s Keaton Lawson tries to break free from Jennings County’s Lane Kirchner (1) and Branden Braun (4) after catching a pass Friday at Jennings County High School.
Tommy Walker | For The Republic
Both Columbus East and Columbus North had strong finishes to the first half of their football games on Friday night.
The Olympians were able to sustain that into the second half in what would become a 49-27 Hoosier Hills Conference win at Jennings County. The Bull Dogs, however, did not score in the second half of a 38-10 loss at Class 4A No. 8 Roncalli.
“Credit to them,” North coach Logan Haston said. “Roncalli is a very solid team, and they’re well coached. They kind of punched us in the mouth early in the game and were able to get out ahead of us. But we were able to recover a fumble and went down and scored and felt good about things going into the locker room at the half. We felt we had some momentum going, and then the second half, we just didn’t execute some things and they did. It was a little bit closer than the final score indicated.”
East led 28-21 at halftime and 28-27 early in the third quarter before scoring the game’s final 21 points to pick up its first win of the season.
Sophomore quarterback Kyson Villarreal ran for 166 yards and two touchdowns and threw for 117 yards and a score, and Tyler Weller ran for 141 yards and two touchdowns for the Olympians (1-3, 1-1), who host New Albany (1-3, 1-1) on Friday.
“Our goal is to try to continue to get better every week, so we’ll look at tape and try to fix some things,” East coach Eddie Vogel said. “Our tackling I didn’t think was very good, so we’ll try to work on that this week. We’ll have New Albany coming to us this week at Stafford Field, and we’ll see how much improvement we’ve made in a week.”
Meanwhile, North trailed only 21-10 at halftime before Roncalli outscored the Bull Dogs 17-0 in the second half. North was plagued by a pair of turnovers.
“I don’t think we played our best football on Friday night on any unit,” Haston said. “A lot of mistakes that we made that are fixable, but not when you’re playing a team of that caliber. We shot ourselves in the foot a few too many times on Friday.”
The Bull Dogs (2-2) face another tough test when they host 3A No. 1 Bishop Chatard on Friday. We’ll have more on that game and the East-New Albany game later this week.
