By Jeremy McDonald
Jeremymcdonald73@gmail.com
BEAVERTON, Ore.– The wrecking ball that is Johnny Mariano once again on full display Friday night against Valley Catholic.
In a game where it felt like an off game for Gervais compared to their previous games, Mariano’s three first-half touchdown performances anchored Gervais going into halftime with a 24-8 halftime lead against Valley Catholic. But the mindset was there.
Just keep grinding. Working. And good things were going to happen.
“We just keep pounding it and pounding it. We didn’t stop until the end,” said Mariano, who finished the game with four rushing scores and over 200 yards on the ground.
The Valiants entered the 3A Special District 1 league game ranked fifth in the classification and had stopped the Cougars on their opening drive of the second half and had the look to draw this game closer.
That was when Gervais did what they do best:
Play Ball.
They got the stops in return to Valley Catholic, and from there, the lead steadily grew.
JJ Navarrete had one of those JJ talks at halftime that now had Gervais rolling. The long bus ride, the rust from that, and the early game hiccups, they seemed to disappear as they led 32-8 after three quarters.
Gervais wanted to make some noise in 3A this year. They wanted to show that their recent successes in 2A weren’t a fluke as they entered the fourth quarter with some more work to do in Friday’s game.
“That halftime speech, he gets intense in there. He just hypes all of us up,” said Mariano of the halftime speech.
“He told us that we can’t be doing that and that we need to step our game up and we can’t be a second-half team anymore. We have to come out firing, especially after playing a good team like this,” adds Angelo Ferreira. “We can’t come out like we did. We got to come out bigger, better, stronger, and fired up.”
The All Gas, No Break philosophy continued into the fourth quarter. The defense held strong, closing out the second half shutout as their offense churned out more points. It was clean football for the latter 24 minutes after a rocky start to the game. The Cougars closed out the 54-8 victory to remain undefeated on the year at 4-0 and are 2-0 in league play.
But.
They know they have to come out stronger next Friday against Banks. They can’t wait until the second quarter as they did against Yamhill-Carlton, or the second half as they did Friday at Valley Catholic to come around.
The Cougars have to come out strong from the opening kick if they hope to continue their strong start to the season against one of the juggernauts of 3A.
“It’s going to have to be big. We’re going to have to show that we can hang with the big dogs. If we come out strong, it’s going to be big for us,” said Roman Baru. “Next week, prove ourselves.
Photos By Jeremy McDonald
