The Mehlville Senior High School football team notched its second victory of the season Friday, defeating Northwest 26-20.
Mehlville fans were in desperate need of a win as their 2-5 team has been struggling this season. Head coach Kent Heinemann told the Call that he hopes some of the momentum the Panthers gained will carry over to this week’s game against Oakville. Against Northwest, the Panthers were trailing in the game up until halftime, when they made some needed adjustments that helped them overcome their first-half struggles.
“We had a pretty good offensive game. We had a hard time stopping them early,” Heinemann said. “We made some halftime adjustments and did a much better job. I think the defensive adjustments we made I think were key, forcing them to throw the ball, which is not what they do.
“And we moved the ball well, 160 yards on the ground … and that was a big part of the game. We didn’t turn the ball over. We were real secure with it (and) made some big passes when we needed to. We played pretty good.”
Brendon Mady scored two touchdowns for the Panthers. Also scoring touchdowns for Mehlville were Jabari Shelton and T.J. Williams.
The fact that Mehlville overcame its early deficit should help the Panthers’ confidence when they find themselves in a similar situation in the future, Heinemann said.
“All year, we’ve been putting ourselves in some tough situations in every game,” he said. “There’s never been a game where we just came out and dominated, came out and executed from the get-go.
“We’re always kind of putting ourselves in some difficult situations. I know that that’s likely to occur at some point next week, but the fact that we overcame that, that we battled back, I feel like we’ve got some momentum to maybe take that into practice this week and fix those problems.”
The Panthers will need all the momentum they can get when they square off against their closest rival, the 4-3 Tigers, at 7 p.m. Friday at Oakville.
Oakvlle is coming off a 42-0 win over Seckman, but history says that numbers and records don’t mean much when these two teams meet. There is a playoff level of intensity in any game between these two teams and either one is capable of victory.
“We are playing Oakville, and our guys usually don’t need any ammo for that game because that is a huge game for them,” Heinemann said. “Some of these kids, they go to school together when they are younger. They play a lot of sports when they are younger, so we know a lot of their kids, and so it’s a pretty good rivalry, a friendly rivalry.”
