Shadow Ridge leaps to top of the heap

Nick Christensen

Monday, Oct. 4, 2004 | 9:51 a.m.

J.D. Johnson expected progress. But his Shadow Ridge football team may be on the verge of something a lot bigger.

Johnson, the sophomore head coach of the second-year Mustangs, led his team to a 14-7 win Friday against Cimarron-Memorial in its first Northwest League game ever. This week the team can all but secure itself a playoff seed with a win at Cheyenne.

Meanwhile for Cimarron, the road gets a little easier, with a home meeting with struggling Centennial.

As his players celebrated and his school's band played, Johnson, normally fiery and intense, looked relaxed.

"I couldn't tell you what emotion I'm feeling," Johnson said. "As far as this team has come, this is everything to us."

The year before, Johnson's group was opening a new school with most of the team coming from Centennial. The Mustangs went 2-7 their inaugural season, both wins coming against 0-9 Liberty despite a schedule that included 3A teams Boulder City and Pahrump Valley.

Now, Shadow Ridge is 4-1, the one loss coming to sixth-ranked Eldorado, a 23-21 contest lost when a punt snap went through the back of the end zone.

"This is a great group of kids," Johnson said. "This gives us confidence. We tell the kids, you win your battles, and we'll win the war."

Once around the town

"It was one of those things, we needed it for our kids to start believing a little bit," Massey said. "Our quarterback in the first series got a gash in his non-throwing hand. He came back in, he was a little shook at times but he picked it back up."

Quarterback Matt Christman is expected to play in Saturday's game at Rancho.

If Valley upsets one of those two teams in league play, it could secure it a second seed in the Northeast playoffs. But Massey said he's not going to worry about that quite yet.

"We're going to take it one game at a time and see what happens," Massey said.

Not Ray Fenton, who was back at his office early Sunday morning, preparing for this week's game against Green Valley.

The Falcons led 41-0 at the end of the first half at Liberty, and the fact that the score got so high embarrassed the longtime Foothill coach.

"We did everything we could not to score that many points," Fenton said. "At the end, I think Liberty's coaches felt better about it than we did."

The Foothill offense, led by D'Angelo Jones' 205 yards on 13 carries, more than doubled its previous best points total this season.

It's been a tough year for the Trailblazers, whose 13-7 home loss to Western lowered them to 0-5 on the season, after zoning changes have dramatically cut the enrollment at Durango, an enrollment cut that's still very irritating to coach John Mausbach.

"When the district took a look at the lines last spring, they had numbers coming in at close to 2,800," Mausbach said Sunday night. "Now we're sitting at under 2,300. To me that doesn't make any sense. Not only is it affecting athletics, but it's affecting band, the drama department, AP classes ... we don't have students. When you have a school down the road with portables, I don't feel it's that difficult to redraw the lines and try to give everybody 2,800 students."

"It was a real physical game, and the way they sent it in was very impressive to me," Palo Verde coach Darwin Rost said. "The big-time hits were in there. We were real well prepared; they did a real good job for us."

While the win certainly gave Rost an opportunity to look toward how the rest of the Northwest might shape up, Rost said he's looking at this week's game at Mojave, with maybe a sideways glance at the competition.

"I'm only as good as our next game, which is Mojave right now," he said.