Kirk Dooley’s Blog
The ghosts of Davis Webb and Torii Hunter, Jr. will be floating above the field at AT&T Stadium on Saturday during the Highland Park–Prosper game. Davis and Hunter won’t be there, but their legacies will be.
Prosper was just another dusty little town north of Dallas when the Tollway expansion and the residential real estate booms made Prosper the next “next Plano”. Families moved in, schools were built and the Eagles played well in 2A and 3A football. The population continues to boom and should hit 20,000 any minute now.
The Eagles went from pretty good to real good three years ago under the leadership of Webb, a highly recruited quarterback and Hunter, a highly-recruited wide receiver. Two years ago Webb, as a true freshman at Texas Tech, broke the Big 12 freshman record for yards passing in a single game. Hunter now starts at Notre Dame and helped the Fighting Irish dehorn the Horns last Saturday.
Webb and Hunter put Prosper on the map. As the town grew, the school landed in 4A, where the Frisco and McKinney schools beat up on the Eagles. But with fancy new facilities, upper middle class families and kids similar to Highland Park’s, this program is on the verge of greatness. Enter Chris Ross, the guy who can do it.
Ross coached Cedar Park from a small dot on the road near Austin to a Texas football powerhouse. He retired from coaching to take an athletic director’s desk job in Leander to live happily ever after. But being removed from the kids and fellow coaches wasn’t the panacea he had envisioned. He missed coaching.
The head coaching job at Prosper opened up and the folks who hired Ross hit a coaching home run. They lured him back onto the field and that makes Prosper the team to watch over the next five years.
This weekend there are two players to watch. Running back Robert Mahone has 90-yard runs for lunch. Two weeks ago he averaged 13 yards per carry on 12 runs. Anytime he touches the ball, he can find the end zone. Quarterback Ryan Davis ran for 183 yards last week. The Scots defense can pick its poison.
Now that the Scots’ 84-game home wining streak has been snapped, look for a more relaxed and more focused Highland Park team. That pressure is now off. The team is still green in some areas but expectations will be higher in Game Three.
The most fascinating thing to watch will be the former linebackers who now populate the Scots’ defensive line. Key linemen keep getting injured, backups are getting hurt and now the coaches are borrowing linebackers and other athletic players to plug in. These new defensive linemen will have their work cut out for them on Saturday, trying to corral both Mahone and Davis, but I predict that they’ll rise to the occasion.
Next month I’ll explain how the loss to Paluski turned out to be a good thing.